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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 




§\a{u inpijrigi^t ^o. 

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 



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ILLUMINATED BRAHMINISM, 



The True Theosophy, 



An Explanation of the Original Doctrines 
of Ranga Hilyod, 



OFTEN CALLED THE GREAT BRAHMA. 

1 ^' 






Transmitted by the Law of Occult Science, 



KANSAS CITY, MO.: 
Spiritual Scientific Publishing Co. 

1889. 




3^^ 



J5? 



Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year eighteen hundred «nd 
eighty-nine, in the office of the Librarian of Congress, by the Spirit- 
ual Scientific Publishing Company. Kansas City, Mo. 



^ 



PKESS OF 

The Geo. w. Crane Publishing Comiany, 
kansas city. mo. 



EDITOE^S PEEFACE. 



This work was written for circulation in India, 
chiefly for the Brahmin caste. It purports to be 
from the sphere of one of the very ancient sages 
of India, who was one of the authors of the sacred 
Vedas. In it he effectually disposes of the ques- 
tion of the reincarnation of the spirit in some of its 
aspects, as well as gives us a rational explanation 
how such a doctrine happened to obtain so strong 
a foothold in the otherwise magnificent system of 
philosophy of that country. 



DEDIOATIOlSr. 



To the Brahmo Somaj of India, and to all thinkers 
who wish to see the glories of the ancient wisdom of 
India restored upon earth in their pristine splendor 
of intellectual power, this work is dedicated by its 
spiritual author. 



CO]^TEI^TS, 



CHAPTER I. 



THE ORIGINAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DOCTRINE OF EEINCAE- 
NATION. 

The original doctrine of one God.— Spirits come from this Being. 
— He never taught that spirit return to Om destroyed the indi- 
viduality. — The companionship of spirits determined by the 
grade of their development. — When the planet once is able to 
produce a Buddha it ever after is able to produce others. — 
India's decline through substitution of the perverted for the 
original ideas. — The equality of the sexes in Brahminism. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE WISDOM OF THE GODS. 

The original idea. — The visible gods. — The spirits of men. — The- 
mistake of supposing the spirits of undeveloped mortals to be 
the wisdom gods. — The deceptive voices that speak from the 
shrines in the name of the great Brahma. — The Christian god 
only a Buddha. — The savage character of the early European 
peoples. — Egyptian materiality. — The eternal evolution of 
spirit. — Om alone to be worthy of worship. 

CHAPTER III. 

THE WISDOM OF THE SACKED CASTE IN ANCIENT DAYS. 

The Brahmin caste the repositories of intellectual and spiritual wis- 
dom. — External rites no safeguard against declension in spir- 
itual wisdom. — Asceticism a failure in producing spiritual 
enlightenment. — The Buddhahood always a part of the Brah- 
min doctrine. — The sacred caste have lost the spiritual knowl- 
edge. — The symbols, mere expressions for the instruction of the 
unlearned. — The Brahmo Somaj. — Spiritual knowledge followa 
the law of evolution. 



VI CONTENTS. 



CHAPTER IV. 

THE WISDOM OF THE DIVINE WORD. 

Dm the Logos of the Greeks. — Brahm, the god of earth, as a 
creator of planets. — Vishnu the preserving power of life ou 
the planet. — Siva, the power of death. — The Christian travesty 
on the Hindoo Triad, — The Greek philosophers familiar with 
the meaning of the word. — The Christian world in the dark 
as to its meaning. — The barbaric character of its people. — The 
bloody theology abhorrent to the Hindoo. — The Om was never 
embodied in any one Avatar. — The incompetency of the Chris- 
tian clergy to teach India. — The spiritual birth of the nations 
of the West not yet fully accomplished. 

CHAPTER V. 

THE COMING OF THE BUDDHA TO ALL, NATIONS. 

The Buddha state a condition of spiritual evolution. — The prep- 
aration of the mother's mentality. — Buddhas are not incar- 
nations of developed spirits, but more perfect evolutions of 
mental life. — They are in sympathy with the better developed 
minds in spirit life. — When they pass to spirit life they should 
not be worshiped. — Gautama, the last of the great Buddhas. — 
He should have taught the doctrine in its purity. — The reason 
why the Buddha light does not come to the present priesthood 
of earth. 

CHAPTER VI. 

THE COMING OF THE MISSIONARIES. 

The spiritual light of Europe imperfect. — The conceit of the Chris- 
tian world. — The East the true source of the religious systems 
of earth. — The invisible foe of the missionary. — Egypt not high 
in the grade of spirituality.— Greece and Rome.— The brutal- 
ity of Romish thought. — The ignorance of Protestant teachers. 
— They brought back the transmitted light of the age of Gau- 
tama.— The missions are part of a great spiritual movement. — 
The release of the spirit hosts from their bondage to the ideas 
of earth. 

CHAPTER VII. 

THE INFLUX OF ORIENTAL IDEAS AMONG THE WESTERN 
NATIONS. 

The rise of the spiritual movement in Europe and America.— The 
opposition of the Christian priesthood.— Their ignorance and 
degradation.— Theii- inordinate pride and vanity. —The break- 



CONTENTS. VH, 

ing of the chains of fear. — The treachery of the priestly class. 

— The irruption of tlie ignorant spirits of the European 
heavens. — The impregnability of Christian superstition. — The 
source of a spiritual influx of a true order. — Its effect upon 
America. 

CHAPTER YIII. 

THE TEUE HISTOKY OF THE CHEISTIAN'S GOD. 

The Avatars of India. — The Messianic prophecies. — Joshua, the 
original of the Christian Jesus. — His death at the hands of the 
priesthood. — His return as a spirit. — The introduction of Bud- 
dhism. — The combination of the two teachers. — The Christian 
priesthood in spirit life. — India holds the key to the problem., 

— The true light. 

CHAPTER IX. 

THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 

The religious reform of the Unitarian separation from the orthodox 
interpretation of the godhead. — Thetheosophy of SakyaMuni. 
— The mixture of the Egyptian ideality with it. ^ The closing 
of the doors of spiritual influx by the Christian fathers. — The 
attitude of tlie church toward spiritual science. — The Buddha- 
hood and' Theosophy. — The fallacious thought of the Christian 
world regarding it. — True Tlieosophy teaches the ultimate re- 
demption of all spirits througli evolution. — Pantheism. 

CHAPTER X. 

THE SYMBOLISM OF AXCIENT WOESHIP. 

The ignorance of the missionaries. — The ball and cross the same 
symbol as the phallus. — The images of the lesser gods. — The 
true signification of all symbols. — The Jewish scriptures a copy 
of the Zoroastrian doctrines and laws of Menu of India. — The 
saints in Christian churches. — The treatment accorded to all 
who have spiritvial gifts by the Christian system. — Its eftect in 
the Christian heavens. — The deception of the priesthood and 
ministry in the Christian wprld. 

CHAPTER XI. 

THE EKEOE OF THE DOCTEINE OF EEINCA.ENATION AS TAUGHT 
BY THE THEOSOPHISTS OF EAETH. 

Planetary life the inceptive life of the spiritual entity. — Prema■^ 
ture removal to be deprecated. — Elementals and elementaries 



Vlll CONTENTS. 

only spirits prematurely detached from the body. — Their mag- 
netic relations with powers in the form. — A good Karma not 
not to be gained by reincarnation. — The better the conditions 
the better the spiritual unfoldment. — -The necessity of magnetic 
attachment to earth to perfect the fomi powers. — The necessity 
of planets to give a perfect expression to spiritual entities. — 
The influx of modern Hindoo thought fraught with danger. — 
The fallacy of all forms of creedalism. — Fanaticism and cre- 
dulity the chief characteristics of the movement. — Xeither 
Hindoo nor Christian theology of the present age reliable. 

CHAPTEK XII. 

THE ORIGIN OF THE SPIRITUAL ENTITY. 

India the first nation to develop a true scheme of metaphysics. — 
The present fictitious drapery of the subject. — The segregation 
of the Infinite Spirit. — Nature produces through planetary re- 
lations the essences of the elements in form. — The elemental 
theory not strictly true. — Man follows the law of evolution the 
same as the reptilian and mammalian types. — The sacred char- 
acter of all life. — Planetary conditions as essential to the evo- 
lution of conscious entity in spirit as to produce the crystalliue 
or cell relations of the elements. — The office of India in spirit- 
ualizing the philosophy of Greece and Egypt. 

CHAPTER XIIL 

THE FRATERNIZATION OF THE ORIENTAL AND OCCIDENTAL 
NATIONS. 

England's conquest of India. — The light of spiritual wisdom that 
India acquired in the ancient days. — The influx of the present 
theosophy. — Its defects. — The true birth of the spirit in the 
sphere of intellectual and moral purity. — Its possibility of at- 
tainment while in the mortal environment. — Keligious systems 
perish when they fail to relieve human needs of the soul. — In- 
tellectual spirituality to come from India. — The relations be- 
tween America and India in the future. — America the child of 
India in spirit. — All nations to. partake of the gifts of the spir- 
itual life. — Sketch of the life of the great teacher called Brahma. 

POETRY. 

The Coming of Brahma. 



IInTEODUOTOEY. 



In writing of tlie mysteries of the ancient faith, I 
ask the reader to remember that it has been many cen- 
turies since I was upon earth in mortal form, and that 
in spirit even I have been aware that the declension of 
knowledge has been proportionate to the perversion of 
the ideas which I once taught to the multitudes of India, 
rather than to any special class ; but as the spiritual father 
of many peoples, I have spoken to all races, so to the 
Brahmin priesthood of Benares would I speak with spe- 
cial emphasis, warning them that they must broaden their 
conceptions of the scope of creative power, and recog- 
nize the universal principles that enable all souls to be 
through creative processes. 

India has power of intellect in excess of all the men- 
tality of earth. She has preserved the form of Divine 
knowledge, although she has perverted its application, 
and from the sacred circle which is now open, according 
to the prophecy of the Vedas, the great Brahma,* speaks 

* The great Brahma, who figures so extensively in Indian theol - 
ogy, was a teacher whose early history is involved in much obscu - 
rity, he should not be confounded with the god Brahma, (who is 
the central figure of the Hindoo triad,) but was a great teacher of 
the primitive faith of Zarathustra, the ancient Persian sage. From 
the system of Oriental metaphor, the application of Brahma to their 
great teachers seems to imply that the minds that were wiser than 



X INTRODUCTORY. 

to all the nations of the earth, instructing them in a 
knowledge of the ancient doctrines, as well as opening 
new truths to their comprehension. 

Buddha has spoken to the Sudras, but Brahma sends 
his words of warning to the highest caste of India, that 
they may know that the great cycle* is again complete, 
and the ancient teachers of Persia and Hindoostan are 
again upon earth speaking to the souls of all the words 
of wisdom and eternal life. 

the multitude were regarded as specially favored of Brahm, and 
thus obtained the appellation of Brahmas. The great Brahma prob- 
ably preceded, or possibly was the original, from whom the Hebrews 
took their ancestral Abram, for the name has the identical root 
word in both cases. — B. 

*The return of the period when the spiritual world is to be 
opened anew to earth, that the ancient (h.-ctrines may be declared 
directly, — B. 



CHAPTEK I. 

THE ORIGINAL SIGNIFICANCE OF THE DOCTRINE OF 
RE-INCARNATION. 

From the realm of creative energy in spirit, there 
comes to the world of physical expression a power of 
thought which fails to find full significance in the pov- 
erty of human language. It is limited in its range of 
appreciation by the undeveloped mind of earth, and 
unless specially guarded by repeated explanations, be- 
comes subject to a construction that is often diametric- 
ally opposite to its original meaning. 

Among the many primitive ideas that belonged to 
the early religious status of India, was the doctrine of 
the incarnation of spirit, and among the lamentable re- 
sults of misunderstanding it is the midnight darkness 
of soul that envelops that unfortunate people who, by 
the perverted language of what was once a great truth, 
and is now, are victims of a malign superstition. 

If there is any one blamable for this perversion, it is 
that priesthood that in my name has taught a doctrine, 
which as I taught it was indeed true, but which under 
its perverted form has become a source of the most 
pestilent spiritual mischief. 

I taught that One Glod alone was Supreme, and the 
true object of adoration and praise. I taught that 
from this Being proceeded all that had life and exist- 
ence in the world of spirit or mortal being. I taught 
that to this Being all who passed from physical life 
would return, but I never taught that returning to the 
2 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY, 



presence spiritual of the great Om* would result in the 
annihilation of the individual or his inability to return 
to earth as a spirit. 

I did teach that all spirits could return to earth to 
manifest, and influence mortals, and I also taught that 
such a return would be determined by the mental bias 
of the individual. If of a low order, his affiliations 
spiritual would be to the companionship of beasts and 
reptiles, for I knew that all life of whatever order had 
its spiritual counterpart in the invisible world. 

When I say I knew, it was because in my experiences 
in the study of spiritual truths I was observant of all 
the spheres of spiritual unfoldment, and I saw that not 
only did man have an immortal nature, but that the 
lower orders of life had their immortality likewise. So 
I forbade the destruction of life, although for many 
generations it was not obeyed by my professed disci- 
ples. 

When I taught of the nature of eternal life and the 
methods whereby spiritual happiness was to be secured, 
I found the same obstacles to a perfect comprehension 
of the ideas that all reformers find in all ages of the 
world. There were those who could not understand 
how a spirit could come to earth without being re-em- 
bodied in physical life, and there were many who could 
not imagine that any life could be which was beyond 
the cognizance of the physical senses. 

*The Sanscrit Om should be translated by the equivaleut All, 
or the complete powers of existence. It has been made the sub- 
ject of much controversy, but the subtle Hindoo mind grasjHMl the 
signification of the all pervading source of being with marvelous 
a<jcuracy. Brahm is not Om, but the creator of the worlds, while 
Om is the ruling power of the universe itself, and greater than 
Brahm or the lesser gods.— B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 



The mental development of the masses then was as 
imperfect as it is now, but there was not then, as now, 
among the mental teachers of the people, an abnormal 
development of the imagination, which has since then 
led to an absurd interpretation of the doctrine of me- 
tempsychosis. 

To have cited my ideas of the spiritual nature as a 
basis for the degradation of the soul of man to the 
brutal realm, would have drawn from me a sharp re- 
buke, for I taught that the pathway of the race was 
upward not downward, and that the world of spirit 
held in itself the power to emancipate all souls from 
the thralldom of spiritual slavery. 

To suppose, therefore, that in the statements which 
I left on record as to the nature of the soul there is or ever 
was any basis for the present theory of transmigration, is 
to pervert a great truth until it has become a most griev- 
ous error. There is one view of the subject of reincarna- 
tion that I privately taught, and have often endeavored 
to impress upon the intelligent Brahmins for many gen- 
erations, which is this: Whenever any great soul arises 
upon earth, manifesting the attributes of wisdom and 
love, such a soul does not lose its power of expression 
upon earth, for there will ever be correlative spirits born 
there, through which the higher developed mind in 
spirit can give expression to its own existence. I 
might even go farther than this; for whenever the earth 
itself is able to evolve the intellectual or moral power 
of a Gautama* or Plato, it will ever after be -able to pro- 
duce equally fine specimens of soul evolution, if not 
their superiors: and in that sense there will ever be re- 

*The great Hindoo philosopher called Buddha, the same often 
called Sakva Muni. 



THE TRUE THEOSOrHY. 



incarnations of the essential spirit of a G-autama or 
Plato, although as individuals they can only return 
through the power of the spiritual transfer of thought, 
which enables them to register upon the mentality of 
mortals the wisdom that pertains to the world of devel- 
oped mind.* 

There has been a sad decline of spiritual power of a 
high character in India by the mistaken ideality of the 
nature of the soul. All souls are the offspring of plan- 
etary conditions, and originate in the concentration of 
forces which enter into planetary construction in in- 
dividualization. They are evolutions of the planet, and 
take their inception there. They are not elementary 
or elementals in form awaiting incarnation previous to 
conception and birth in physical life. The planet is the 
gestating stage of all souls as well as bodies, and the 
ideas that are now taught as Hindoo theories of the 
origin of spirits belong to the lower rather than higher 
schools of Hindoo thought.! 

Understanding this, therefore, the moral status of 
India may be uplifted by the idea that reincarnation and 
metempsychosis are not to be hereafter taught as truths 
in the old sense, but rather by their true explanation 

* This statement sheds a world of light upon the original doc- 
trines of transmigration and reincarnation of the spirit. It is sin- 
gular that such a view of it should have been lost or obscured, but 
the probability is tliat in the lapse of ages Hindoo theologians, like 
their Christian imitators, sought to improve upon the original 
doctrines. They have made a strange medley of what was a sim- 
ple fact in the evolution of the spiritual nature, and we have in 
the return of this spirit the corrective of this gigantic superstition 
that holds India in the mazes of error. — B. 

f Here is a staggering blow to the theory taught by man> Thc- 
osophists as to the nature of spirit, and a i)ositive contradiction to 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 



the world can again take from India the knowledge of 
a spiritual philosophy that shall serve to elevate the 
nations of the earth above the plane of physical sense, 
and, at the same time, raise its intellectual status to a 
realization of the principle that once made India the 
mental light of the earth. 

There is one effect of the doctrine of reincarnation of 
the souls of the dead that is felt with direful power in 
the spiritual world of India. Myriads who have left 
the physical life hover over the mortals of that country 
seeking for opportunities to become re-embodied, in order 
that they may realize the promised relief from their 
imperfect development in the former earth life. They 
are earth-bound to a degree that infects the mental at- 
mosphere of its people with almost hopeless despair, 
for however intense may be their desire, they are never 
able to obtain the fancied reincarnation. 

They indeed seek the presence of opportunities in- 
numerable through mental impress of the sexes, but 
beyond inciting an abnormal sexual impulse they effect 
nothing toward producing the result desired, and in 
place of a new life in the physical world they only suc- 
ceed in debasing their spiritual natures by recurrence 
to the sensations and thoughts of earth. India has 
suffered intensely in spiritual declension because of 
this, and many of its people have really become seri- 

that school of Spiritualists who are ever prating of elenientals and 
reincarnation. With the higher thought from the spirit sages of 
India as a corrective, it is to be hoped that the misuse of these 
terms will pass away under the light of a truer interpretation of 
the Hindoo thought. Spirits or mortals who teach the existence 
of souls apart from planetary evolution need more instruction ere 
they become teachers. — B. 



6 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

ously retarded in their progress toward an intellectual 
spirituality. * 

In place of the profound thought that once character- 
ized the Brahmin priesthood in the days when Pytha- 
goras,^ of Grreece, and the other sages of the West 
journeyed to India to learn of the science of the soul, 
the sacred race has degenerated in its spiritual wisdom 
to the level of earthly cunning and intellectual sub- 
tlety, but in so doing has closed the eyes of the spirit 
to that higher light which should ever be the distin- 
guishing power of the true follower of Brahm. 

It is not in anger nor in disdain that I allude to the 
present status of the Hindoo mind which reflects so 
strongly the effects of perverted teaching of the primi- 
tive faith. The spirit of India has been broken by sub- 
servience to the Brahmin caste, but the priesthood has 
not been able in spite of its prerogatives to preserve 
its spiritual freedom. It has lost the vitality of the 
spirit of the thought which made Brahminism the con- 
trolling power of India, and, through its mental bril- 
liancy, the governing force of the nations of the ancient 
world. 

The distinct province of the primitive faith was to 
illuminate the mind of man with all knowledge. Its 

*This explains why the spiritual life of luclia has so deteri- 
orated through a false interpretation of the ideas of her great 
teachers. The spiritual life being an evolution, and its recipients, 
failing to obtain true ideas relating to it while upon the earth, 
crowd back to obtain the promised relief, which nature denying, 
plunges them into chaos and despair. By thought impress upon 
their mortal companions, they transfer this mental state to them 
also, so that the whole nation beconu's subject to helpless hoj)eless- 
ness. — B. 

* Pythagoras, an ancient Greek phil()soi)l;er who went to India 
to complete his studies in spiritual science. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 



cosmogony was based upon the evolirfcionary powers of 
nature. The egg which floated in the vast waters aver 
which Brahm brooded, and from which was born the 
earth, was only a metaphor of speech which the sages 
of the modern age recognize as the source of all created 
form, and from which all visible life proceeds.* 

All the transmutations and changes which material 
life exhibits were observed by the teachers of the an- 
cient faith, and spiritual life, in the time of my earth 
life, was not disassociated with that life that is the 
basis of soul evolution from the material relations of 
being. There was as much recognition of the femi- 
nine nature in creative power as of the masculine, and 
Brahma, the world builder, had his soul mate in Yutiv 
or Saravasti, the mother of his different children. 

Brahma might construct a world by manipulation of 
the chemical and mechanical forces, but he could not 
people it alone, and woman, in Hindoo mythology, 
stands equal with Brahma, if she does not grade higher, 
in the work of creating beings having an eternal nature. 

For the world may dissolve and pass away forever, 
but the soul life that has come from its life is to endure 
in sentient existence through the countless cycles of 

*This interpretation of the old cosmogony, as to all life com- 
ing from the egg, is another proof that the Oriental world had 
veiled in metaphor some of the great scientific discoveries of the 
ancient sages. It is a straightforward admittance that evolution is 
the method of planetary processes, and the wonder is that some of 
our modern scholars of Indian literature cannot give the credit to 
these master minds of the ancient world for their great insight 
into the works of nature. Probably the supreme egotism of the 
Western mind, and its ignorance of Oriental methods of convey hi g 
knowledge, are sufficient for the light esteem in which their ideas 
are held. — B. 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 



being. Therefore, let the priesthood of Benares, as 
well as all through the borders of India, change the 
current of thought relative to the subject of the rein- 
carnation of the sj^irit. It will not return again to re- 
enter the sphere of embodied life, although it may cling 
to earth with the tenacity of a perverted imagination 
for centuries. It cannot progress toward the grade of 
an intelligent understanding of creative power as long 
as it seeks to re-enter the sphere of earth embodiment, 
and its purification can only be attained by rising above 
the conceptions of perverted thought or the atmos- 
phere of sensuality or deception. 

Like as the father pities the wanderings of his way- 
ward children, do the risen hosts of India regard the 
spiritual declensions of the sacred order who have 
mistaken the perverted ideas of man for the revelations 
of the gods. 

Proud and haughty in their fancied security, have the 
leaders of the Brahminical faith sought to monopolize 
the spiritual light of India for the sacred caste; but 
aside from the cultivation of the mental power that be- 
longs to the plane of earth, they are unable to obtain 
the greater evidence that belongs to the pro\ince of 
spiritual unfoldment. 

From the heights of mental insio-ht in the world of 
spirit, we see all that transpires in the temples and 
sacred circles, and if the gods have withdrawn from 
the shrines, and the oracles are filled with the voices of 
craft and deception, it is because in the plenitude of 
power the Brahmin priesthood has failed to preserve 
intact the spirit of the Vedantic writings. 

O, priesthood of Benares, return to the faith of the 
fathers. How often I taught the ancient disciples the 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY, 



sacred character of all life, and that the Eternal Om 
was not to be mocked with frivolous pretensions. I 
warned them that unless sincerity and truth was a 
basis of their faith they would fail to attain the heights 
of eternal peace or absorption in the Supreme Brahm. 

My w^ords have proven true, and in the declension 
from that spiritual exaltation which once marked the 
Brahmin as the son of divine wisdom, is seen the super- 
stitious cunning that gives the Brahmin name contempt 
in the minds of the intelligent of other nations. 

You pride yourselves upon the caste restrictions that 
have preserved your blood pure throughout all genera- 
tions. You look with scorn upon the lower castes as 
unable to attain the heights of spiritual wisdom which 
you claim as a birthright, but you fail to grasp the true 
significance of all spiritual growth, for it comes to the 
soul in its weakness of the flesh as readily as to the 
spirit strong in the mental acquirements of countless 
generations. 

Did not the god of your fathers speak, saying, '-I 
am the father of all flesh?" Whence then do ye aver 
that you have a special claim upon the consideration of 
eternal wisdom, or that to you are given special privi- 
leges above the other sons of Brahm, who equally with 
you are recipients of his bounty? 

Not thus did I teach in the ancient days, and not 
thus do I teach now, but in wisdom and purity of life 
is to be found your redemption from the power of 
earthly imperfections. 

Sons of Brahma, you are not wise in this. In look- 
ing for the return of the ancient wisdom, seek the inner 
light of the spirit. Dense darkness broods over the 
nation from the mountains to the dark waters, but In- 



10 THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 

clia that once lighted the Western world by the torch of 
a transcendent spiritual illumination has yet a mission 
of power and grandeur that shall be felt upon the earth 
forevermore. 

She is not dead, but sleeping, and her priesthood are 
not beyond the power of a spiritual awakening that 
shall place her in the front of human progress far above 
the plane occupied by the priests of the Western world; 
for they have the blood of centuries of intellectual cul- 
ture in their veins, and when they rise above the su- 
perstitions engendered by a false interpretation of the 
ancient doctrines, they will then be ready to act upon 
a plane of spirituality that the disciples of the Chris- 
tian world dare not approach. 

O, India, the pearl of the nations! thy glory may be 
obscured for a season, but as thou based thy civiliza- 
tion upon the eternity of the spirit thy nationality 
cannot perish, for thy glory is immortality. Earthly 
palaces and temples fall and decay, but in the invisible 
guardianship of thy spiritual children thou hast the 
guerdon of perpetual growth and stability. Egyptian, 
Grecian and Roman splendor have vanished in the night 
of eternal oblivion, but the land where Pythagoras and 
Apollonius * learned the secrets of the soul blooms forth 
afresh as each succeeding generation seeks as they sought 
the knowledge immortal at the shrines of a people who 
never have lost beyond recall the power to penetrate 
the secrets of the eternal world. 

It is India that rules the mind world of Europe and 
America. It is India that gave them all that is valua- 

* A great spiritual teacher born atTyaiia in Ca]ii)ado(Ma about the 
beginning of the Christian era. See Encyclopedia Brittannica for 
full account of his life. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. H 

ble in their systems of mental and spiritual culture, al- 
though they know it not, and with childish greed and 
impatience demand a recognition from the Oriental 
world as though they were the original discoverers of 
spiritual and material knowledge. 

Little do they realize, in their crude material devel- 
opment, that when their ancestors were emerging from 
the wilds of primitive savagery, the sages of India had 
discovered the secrets of eternal existence, and formu- 
lated a system whereby knowledge of spiritual powers 
could be preserved for a heritage to the nations.* 

Regard not, O children of the Sun, the pretensions 
of these children of darkness to the possession of a mo- 
nopoly of spiritual knowledge. They boast of one in- 
carnation of Vishnu f as their god, but you know that 
India has had its numerous incarnations of that mani- 
festation of Divine wisdom; and you also know that 
India never treated her avatars with the cruelty with 
which they treated the only one they claim to have ever 
had, and which they now aver was a part of the Divine 
purpose in sending him into the world to atone for the 
sins of a savage people. 

*Here the source of that wonderful philosophy which originated 
ill the Oriental nations is clearly set forth, and some inkling of the 
marvelous mentality of its authors is discernible in these sen- 
tences. While the philosophers of the West were bound in a ma- 
terial life-thought, and stumbled at the threshold of the gateway 
of spiritual knowledge, the sages of India had penetrated the inner 
spheres of spiritual existence, and were quite familiar with the 
sources of mind power. They lacked the language to express the 
thought in scientific terms, but they had the ideas in essence, and 
a true interpretation of their symbols shows how nearly mental 
growth follows the same channel in all ages. — B. 

f The second person of the Hindoo triad, or the savior of life. 



12 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

Cruel as they claim the gods of India to have been, 
none of them equal in savage ferocity the God of the 
Christian world, according to Christian theology, for 
their God sent His only begotten son, in order that, 
through death. His savage wrath might be satiated by 
the blood of the innocent.* 

Remember, O sons of Brahm, that their missionaries 
are the children of savages, who destroyed their own 
Savior, and that the mind of the savage is not entirely 
obliterated in them, although their Savior had no sym- 
pathy or affiliation with the doctrines they seek to im- 
pose upon India as the work of the Supreme Creator. 

These children of the Western nations know little of 
spiritual existence. They belong to another age of the 
world than the spiritual, and all they can bring is the 
borrowed light that once left India's shores, and after 
traversing the globe has again returned in diminished 
splendor and colored by the mental surroundings 
through which it is transmitted. 

They have material wisdom and that degree of spirit- 
ual unfoldment that pertains to the first stage of ^merg- 
ing from the plane of savagery or barbarism, but they 
are blind to the higher light of the spirit, and their 

* Much has been written by the missionaries of the cruel rites 
of Hindoo worship, but this analysis of Christian theology by the 
acute mind of a Hindoo spirit must pass for a masterpiece of sub- 
tlety in the line of repartee. To preach to such a people of the 
goodness and benevolence of the Deity who has planned sucli a 
sacrifice, and to call their gods cruel, is the height of folly, and 
the assertion of the spirit that the theology is the conception of a 
savage people is consistent as well as true. What a pity the peo- 
ple who represent the Christian virtues should feel it necessary to 
teach such infernal ideas as a part of a Divine system to redeem 
the race. — B. 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 13 

doctrines of the resurrection of the body show how 
little they comprehend of the great truth of the nature 
and powers of the spirit in the world eternal. 

They have, however, escaped the eri^ors of the doc- 
trine of transmigration of the spirit, but their millions 
who cling to earth seeking to re-enter their crumbling- 
bodies are a striking spectacle to those who know of 
the sad effects upon the spirit that is subject to either 
idea. Therefore, I come again, as I prophesied I would 
come, to say to India to rise anew from the night of 
gloom and sorrow, and let the Ijght of Brahm shine 
forth to illuminate every soul that enters the pathway 
of life on the earth. 



CHAPTER II. 

THE WISDOM OF THE GODS. 

In the philosophy of the ancient faith there was 
taught this doctrine, viz. , that the wisdom of the gods 
was derived from a knowledge of the virtues of the Su- 
preme Brahm. To the latter was ascribed the power of 
creative energy, by virtue of which all life had its ori- 
gin in the will of the creator. The transfer of this 
thought to the philosophy of the West was attended 
with some disadvantages to the primitive faith, for the 
inhabitants of both Persia and Greece were crude and 
savage in their mental development, and to them the 
wisdom of the gods became a mass of fictitious theories, 
through which ran a thread of the primitive principles, 
around which the theories were clustered. 

The only gods of the ancient world who ever mani- 
fested their presence to mortals in visible form were 
the spiritual guardians of the tribes and nations that 
then inhabited the earth, and the wisdom of the gods 
of this order was often crude and unreliable. The wiser 
minds in spirit sought to impress the knowledge of 
principles upon the ignorant, undeveloped minds of 
mortals, but the latter, in their ignorance of the nature 
of life in the invisible Avorld, sought wisdom through 
those manifestations of spirit that appealed to the phys- 
ical senses; and as they once worshiped the invisible 
principle veiled in the symbolical image, so they trans- 
ferred their worship of the invisible to the visible im- 
age that came again from the realms of spirit, as if it 

(14) 



THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 15 

had in itself the power of creating and controlling the 
destinies of the world. '^ 

When India transferred her worship from the Su- 
preme Om to the Supreme Brahm she sank in the grade 
of spirituality one degree, but when she threw open 
the gates of the world invisible, by invoking the aid of 
her spirit children as gods, she declined rapidly in the 
scale of spiritual power; for the latter, although be- 
yond the sphere of physical sense, were far from per- 
fect in knowledge, and the wisdom of the gods became 
foolishness to the people. That sublime conception 
of the power and nature of the spiritual exaltation of 
the gods became dwarfed to the superstitious reverence 
for the unknown, which at this day marks the religious 
bias of both Christian and so-called Heathen nations. 

In this declension there is no difference in spiritual 
effects, for the people of all nations rise or fall in the 
grades of spirituality, not by any superiority of the 
gods they worship, but because they fail to stand erect 
in the consciousness that all men are the children of the 
Supreme Om, and that all are capable of attaining that 
measure of supreme wisdom which belongs to the chil- 
dren of light. 

I am well aware of the errors that have obscured the 

* This statement of the origin of the worship of spirits and angels 
as gods throws a powerful light upon the source of India' s decline 
iu spiritual power, for to worship a spirit as a god could hardly 
fail to degrade the worshiper. The worship of an embodied spirit 
as a god, which some of the Roman emperors demanded in their 
life time, marked a period of declension and loss of that national 
spirit which was essential to the well being of the state. The 
claim of reverence as a god provoked contempt rather than loyal 
allegiance, and the claims were never allowed by the wiser em- 
perors. — B. 



16 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

ancient Brahmin faith, and that the priesthood have 
failed to discriminate between the external symbols 
and the spiritual signification of the images. I am also 
well aware that the Brahmin of Benares looks in vain 
for the wisdom from the world of spirit which once 
made the voice of the sacred circle respond literally to 
the edicts of Divine authority, but I wish them to know 
that when the voice of wisdom speaks from the spiritual 
circle it is the voice of Brahm only when it expresses 
the principles of omnipotent knowledge and power, and 
it should also agree with the ideas of love and benevo- 
lence that belong to universal fatherhood and mother- 
hood. When it speaks not in accord with that it is not 
the voice of Om or Brahm, but ot Siva,* or rather the 
voice of the deceptive minds in spirit that prefer to rule 
the mind of mortals through fear, instead of that pure 
light that once established the doctrine of universal 
fraternity, f 

No spirit speaking from the shrines in the name of 
Brahm, who fails to respond to the truths of the Vedas 
as they were originally given, should be tolerated as of 
the Brahmin order, but he is rather a spirit of dark- 
ness than a child of light, even if he comes in the robes 

*The third person of the Hindoo trinity, or the death principle 
personified. 

f It seems from this statement that India has had its false oracles, 
who have not been afraid to speak from the circle, in the name of 
the great Bralima, doctrines that he would not approve or tolerate. 
In fact, it is more than probable that spirits of the lower orders 
have appeared in their circles, attracted by the deceptive craft of 
the priesthood, and proclaimed that they were the messengers of 
Brahma, or himself come back in personal fonn. It is not unlikely 
that the priesthood were deceived by these spirits to institute the 
present degraded forms of worship. — B. 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 17 

of purity and speaks from the sacred circle as the mes- 
senger of Divine Wisdom. If he counsels pride of caste 
or contemns the souls of any, he belongs not to the 
sphere of Divine Wisdom, nor should his words be heeded 
as though they reflected the mind of Brahm. They are 
of Siva, and Brahma or Vishnu have nothing in accord 
with them. 

If we turn to invoke the aid of the spiritual guardi- 
ans of the Western nations, we find that they also re- 
flect the same mental inferiority that pertains to the 
sphere of undeveloped spirit, for the God of the Chris- 
tian world is only a modified image of the avatars of 
India. * 

The Christian beseeches the spirit of his incarnate 
god as the races of India call upon their spirit deities 
that abound at so many shrines, but the Christian 
world has reduced the number to one idealized charac- 
ter, who embodies all the virtues of the Supreme Om 
as well as the full developed mental powers in the form 
of man. Therefore, the Christian god becomes, in the 
mythology of India, a Buddha, and corresponds nearest 
in the grade of spiritual development to the idealized 
divinity of G-autama, from whom, in reality, the early^ 

*In Indian mythology, the return to earth of a god to be incar- 
nated. By some curious ti-ansfer of the idea to the West, the 
present Christian deity is a modified form of this Hindoo doctrine. 
This spirit discusses it with a lucidity of expression that is quite 
a relief to the sanctimonious ignorance with which Christian theo- 
logians approach the subject. It must be rather humiliating to 
the pride of the average D. D. to be told his God is but a revamped 
edition of a Hindoo avatar, but it nevertheless seems to have a 
substantial foundation in fact, as India has more than a score of 
the avatars to the Christian's one. — B. 
3 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 



Christian disciples took most of their ideas of the na- 
ture of the spiritual life. 

But the Christian deity was impotent to repress the 
savage ferocity of the European peoples, and the his- 
tory of Christian nations has been a record of bloody 
strife and superstitious rendering of spiritual ideas that 
has made the Christian world a terror to the inhabi- 
tants of more peaceful civilizations, and war and con- 
quest have been their characteristics ever since their 
first emperor placed the sign of the cross upon his 
standards as the omen of victory. 

The wisdom of the gods of the Western world has 
never graded higher than the mental development of 
their worshipers, and whether they bow at the shrines 
of the bloody minded Jehovah or the more peaceable 
Jesus or Joshua, they have ever reflected the inner spirit- 
ual darkness or light with which their mentality has 
been colored. To this day they sit in the gloom of 
mediaeval obscurity in which their spiritual theories 
first received their gestation and birth. 

Ignorant as children of the nature of life, the nations 
of the Western world mistake the twilight gloom of a 
spiritual unfoldment to come for the radiant luster of 
the full truth of the spirit, and proclaim to the world 
that to them alone is given the monopoly of spiritual 
wisdom and the fullness of Divine revelation, although 
all the written words of their oracles, that they have 
preserved in mutilated form, came from India originally. * 

* M. Ernest Renan has ably traced out the connection of ideas 
by which the Jewish and Christian scripture are connected with 
the writings of India. Nor are his surmises or conchisions with- 
out foundation. This people were spiritualized in thought long 
before the Western nations were developed enough to have a liter- 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 19 

As one proof of this, let me cite the reader to the care 
with which ancient Egypt preserved her dead, that 
they might again inhabit the earth in physical form, 
and contrast it with the ideality with which India sur- 
rounded the subject of the spiritual life, when the dead 
were burned that the spirit might forever be released 
from connection in thought with the materiality of 
earth. The Christian world still clings to Egyptian 
materiality in its construction of the dogma of the res- 
urrection of the body, while heathen India knows that 
when the spirit has once been released from the phys- 
ical form it can never return to reanimate or have fur- 
ther connection with it. 

The gods of the Christian world are ideals in mate- 
rial form. The worship of them is only another form of 
idolatry which has descended to it through a natural 
evolution of the polytheism of the ancient nations of 
G-reece and Egypt. In their divinely begotten Son of 
G-od they preserve the traditions of Egyptian and G-re- 
cian mythology, as well as the avatarship of India. In 
reality the birth and nativity of all men are alike, but 
the spiritual wisdom that can be originated or reflected 
by some has its source in a developed spirituality of 
mind which has been considered evidence of a superior 
origin. It is nothing more than a superior development, 
and, while it may reflect the wisdom of the gods, it has 
no claim to a Divine paternity, nor should it be so re- 
garded by the less enlightened. When it is made the 
subject of deific worship it becomes a serious detriment 

ature or even a history. The coming of the Abramic ideas to the 
West, and their clear connection with the Brahminic theories of the 
East, show that the Israelitish race is kin to some Indian ancestry, 
and their religion a variety of the Brahminic doctrines. — B. 



20 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

to both worshiper and spirit, and is the cause of a per- 
verted growth in spiritual knowledge, both on earth 
and in the world eternal. 

The voice of the spiritual source of all light and 
knowledge is not heard directly by any embodied spirit 
in existence. It remains behind the impenetrable veil 
of eloquent silence, and speaks to the soul of man. 
through its own powers, by an eternal evolution. He 
growls and expands under its mysterious impulses until 
he can measure the lesser grades of creative expression, 
as witnessed in the evolution of suns and planetary 
systems; but beyond all these lies the Supreme Om, 
that never has been apprehended by the wisest minds 
existent in the world of souls. 

Man can approach the grade of sentient wisdom of 
the Supreme Brahm, and be absorbed by or equal with 
that power expressed by the word, but the Om is 
greater than Brahm, and alone is worthy the adoration 
and praise of all sentient creation.* Brahma, Vishnu 
and Siva are the gods of earth, and embody the wisdom 
of earthly attainment. Brahm, Agni and Ifidra are 
each great in their domain; but above all these gods is 
the Supreme Wisdom, to whom the knowledge of the 
lesser gods is as childish speculation. Therefore, let 
the disciples of Brahm lift their souls toward the Su- 
preme Om if they would receive the highest wisdom, 
for then they are in that pathway that leads the soul 
above the plane of earthly ambition or pursuits. 

* This distinction between the meaning of the words Brahm and 
Om is so important that it should not be overlooked. Brahm. the 
creative power that constructs worlds, is so much less in majesty than 
Om that he cannot be said to exceed the ability of man, in essence. 
Brahm is the world builder, but Om is the soul of the universe, 
from whom Brahm obtains his wisdom, but whom he may never 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 21 

It is in vain. O children of the Sun. that von seek 
the divine wisdom at the shrines of the lesser gods. 
Like the Christian world, your gods are silent when 
you approach the Divinity in embodied form. In vain 
the Christian beseeches his god to appear to fulfill 
his promises, and you. likewise, will never see the great 
teachers of India reappear again in embodied form to 
receive the worship of the multitude, as you have so 
vainly imagined. 

We hear your cries and understand your desires, but 
we also know that you will never ascend in the grade 
of spiritual development by calling us back to the 
sphere of physical embodiment. You must come up- 
ward, rather than ask us to descend from the Xirvanian* 
heavens to assist you in the attainment of spiritual 
knowledge. We will answer you by thoughts that lift 
the soul above the plane of earth, but we are not gods 
to be worshiped, nor are we ambitious to be so regarded. 
Detach your minds from us as gods, and we become your 
powerful allies in spirit. Hold us to earth as gods, and 
we evade you and answer not. for we have done with 
earth and its childish allurements forever. 

O. children of Brahm. rise to become children of 
Om. and the sacred fires will blaze forth afresh upon 
your altars. The divine messengers will reappear 
a2:ain in the sacred circle, and the voices of vour o^reat 
teachers will be heard from the inner shrines, oivinor 
anew the greater and grander truths concerning 
the souls eternal destiny. 

hope to equal. Christian theology expresses the essential ideas of 
creator. j)reserver and diviae companionship in its trinity, but 
fails to comprehend the methods of either. 

*Tiie highest realm of spiritual existence in the future life. 
The a'xKie of the great philosophers and purified spirits of earth. 



CHAPTEE III. 

THE WISDOM OF THE SACKED CASTE IN THE AN- 
CIENT DAYS. 

When I think of the glories of the ancient doctrines 
of India and the height of her attainments in the men- 
tal world, I am loth to witness the declension of that 
wisdom that once made her the envy of the surround- 
ing nations of the earth. 

To be a Brahmin was to be devoted to the considera- 
tion and attainment of the highest spiritual wisdom. 
The garments of white, in which the form was ever to 
be clothed, were, symbolical of that illuminating purity 
of character that belonged to the sphere of perfect 
mental and moral unfoldment. There was a difference 
in degree of wisdom between the Brahmin and the 
lower castes, but there was not that disregard of the 
importance or esteem in which all souls should be held 
who possess the nature of immortal beings, that has 
since marked the decline of the primitive ideality of the 
ancient faith. 

The declension began with the substitution of exter- 
nal rites and ceremonies for the cultivation of the finer 
qualities of the spiritual nature. It is hard for the 
dwarfed mentality of a perverted imagination to realize 
this, but no soul can attain to spiritual wisdom that 
neglects the foundation principle of humility of spirit. 

Therefore, the mind of any class or caste that fails 
to realize this remains upon a lower plane of spiritual 
unfoldment than the soul that thankfully rejoices in 

(22) 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 23 

the coming of light to any mind, even if of the lower 
castes, for the light of spiritual life follows a law of its 
own when it touches the nature of any soul upon earth. 
It does not deflect from a straightforward course of 
procedure, but by the law of spiritual and mental evo- 
lution, it illuminates the soul of the recipient with that 
divine enlightenment that has been a source of mystery 
to the less developed spirit. 

Here was the beginning of that substitution of ascetic 
mortification of the flesh that the spirit might obtain a 
forced growth of spiritual perception, but it proved 
abortive in the majority of cases, for the spirit must 
have its natural evolution as well as the body, and 
forced growth in either ends in distorted instead of sym- 
metrical results.^ 

The mentality of the sacred caste deteriorated under 
the severe code of physical discipline, and the wisdom 
of the wise became foolishness through the vain efforts 
to approach the spiritual world by the systematic sup- 
pression of the natural methods of evolutionary un- 
foldment. The Brahmin caste did, indeed, become 
famous for its external rit^s of sanctity, but it was 
too often external only, for the natural functions of the 
body, being repressed in their legitimate channels of 

*Thi.s is a significant rebuke to the ignorance and fanaticism 
preached in Christian nations as gospel truth. To prate of the 
danger of delay, or to teach that the eternal destiny of the spirit is 
dependent upon a mystical theory of theological imbecility, is the 
weakness of the least intelligent advocates of the Christian system, 
but here a spirit who has lived in both worlds declares it to be a 
necessity of evolution that the spirit should have time to perfect 
its powers ere it can reflect the ultimate design of its existence. 
With an eternity to work out its redemption, the soul can hardly 
miss its final evolution from the power of adverse conditions. — B. 



'24: THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

action, turned themselves into the pathway of perverted, 
although secret, gratification, and the moral nature suf- 
fered deeply in its most private and sacred relations. 

The consequences ot this perversion of the mental and 
physical laws of being were soon manifest in the declin- 
ing mental and spiritual power of the priesthood, for 
in place of the exalted concepts of the ideas that had 
been transmitted through the medium of written lan- 
guage came a distorted and mythical interpretation of 
the symbols that once served to illustrate the pure 
ideality of an unperverted imagination. 

The sacred caste declined in spirituality, and substi- 
tuted for that purity of soul which belongs to an unde- 
filed nature the sanctimonous hypocrisy which served 
to veil the inner corruption from the physical sight 
and by alliance with arbitrary force held its power over 
the other castes, although it could not conipete with 
that more subtle power of spirit which was able to pene- 
trate the more teachable intellect of the Sudras, and 
which lit up their souls with the transcendent glory 
that ever after made the Buddhists the modifying; if 
not really controlling, power of Indian spirituality. 

It is claimed by the Christian world that Buddha's 
light has been extinguished in Hindoostan. and that 
the country is submerged in the grossest forms of idol 
worship; but I would say that the coming of the 
Buddhas was always a part of the Brahmin doctrines, 
and the only error tl^at the priesthood of this age holds 
concerning it is, that the Buddhas must come from the 
Sacred Order; for. although they might come from it as 
well as elsewhere, they are not confined to- any class, 
nor have they ever been. It was not so taught by the 
ancient writers, and the assumption of it as a condition 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 25 

of reliable authority in attaining the Buddhahood is on 
a par with the Christian dogma, that those only who 
believe in their avatar have any chance of final happi- 
ness in the life eternal. 

Neither Brahmin nor Christian has supreme juris- 
diction in the world of soul life, and their attempts 
to monopolize the principles of eternal existence in be- 
half of their castes or creeds is destined to ignomin- 
ious failure. The Supreme Om has so arranged the 
course of spiritual evolution that even Brahm cannot 
prevent the attainment of human happiness by all man- 
kind, should he so desire; but Brahm is not exclusive 
in his dominion of the world, nor did he ever teach 
that he held one race in abhorrence or another in 
esteem. Rather did he teach all that by observance of 
the law of life all should attain to wisdom and goodness, 
although he spoke warning words to those who should 
live in violation of the decrees of purity and benevolence. 

The ancient teachers of the Brahmin faith understood 
this and obeyed the precepts, but their degenerate de- 
scendants, by a perverted interpretation of the symbols, 
lost the sacred knowledge, and in vain have substituted 
for it the wisdom of man in the low^er state of mental 
growth, instead of that exalted spiritual condition by 
which spiritual discernment of ideas becomes a possi- 
bility. 

Through this declension the modern priesthood has 
failed to read the symbols aright, and the wisdom of 
the ancient doctrines has become obscured by absurd 
talss of metempsychosis, which excite the derision of 
the unlearned as well as the contempt of the disciples 
of evolutionary thought. The sons of Brahma know 
that imagery and symbols are for the unlearned in the 



26 TPIE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

inner life, not to be regarded as objects of adoration 
and praise by the minds of the wise and intelligent. 

Nor should the doctrines that were veiled under the 
figurative expressions of transmigration be literally 
rendered as expressive of spiritual existence, but as the 
metaphorical language in which the Oriental mind loves 
to convey the great truths that pertain to the life of 
the soul. I should indeed be worthy of the scorn and 
derision with which the Christian world regards the in- 
telligence that conceived the absurd cycle of endless 
rounds of incarnation until absorption in Brahm anni- 
hilates the individuality, had I ever really taught such 
a doctrine; but like the fate that befalls all the great re- 
forms in the ideal world of mind, the pure doctrine of 
the spiritual nature has had a distorted and perverted 
translation from its primitive significance, and the wiser 
minds in India are now transmitting a purer interpre- 
tation of its original meaning. 

The Brahmo Somaj is nearer the original thought of 
the great founder of the Brahmin faith than any other 
sect in India, but it needs to add to the mental con- 
cepts of the spiritual world a recognition of its great 
influence upon the mentality of earth through the trans- 
mission of thought by direct transfer, and that the 
grade of the thought is an index of the degree of men- 
tal unfoldment of the spirit of the thinker. 

It is right in rejecting the principle of avatar- 
ship and abolition of caste as essential to a knowledge 
of the truth, but it should also enlist the sympathies 
and co-operation of the enlightened of all races by an- 
nouncing to the world its true position on the ques- 
tions of spiritual enlightenment, and the availibility of 



THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 



ancient as well as modern -means to establish a frater- 
nization of spiritual thought throughout the earth. 

The Christian world clings to the avatar idea because 
the Christian theologian is upon the plane of spiritual 
childhood, but the mature mentality of the Brahmo 
Somaj rejects the childish conceptions of the orthodox 
Brahmin or Christian as literal truth, and relegates 
the ideas of both to the undeveloped period of the race, 
when the influx of spiritual light was considered to be 
the evidence of supernatural wisdom or favor. 

The wisdom of the ancient teachers of India always 
rejected the idea of avatarship as ordinarily understood. 
None of them, while in the mortal state, claimed to be 
incarnations of Vishnu, or the Divine Wisdom. Their 
apotheosis came after their transfer to the spiritual 
world, and generally after several generations had 
passed away from earth. Then arose their worship by 
the priesthood, who sank in spiritual declension in just 
the proportion that they falsified the original doctrines, 
and thus the great ideas of the enlightened teachers 
lost their power through the false construction placed 
upon them by the spiritually undeveloped.^ 

For in all nations this principle holds good, that 

* India has followed the same pathway that Christian nations 
are now traversing. The apotheosis of Jesus or Joshua took place 
several centuries after his transition from earth, and the pagan 
nations of the Roman empire furnished the bulk of his disciples. 
The whole bodj- of his followers became subservient to a priest- 
hood that taught anything they chose as gospel, and for many cen- 
turies the European world went into the densest spiritual darkness. 
Even yet the light in the Christian world is of the sun shining in 
a fog rather than with uninterrupted rays, and its teachers deal 
with spiritual ideas outside of their creeds as though they were 
dangerous. — B. 



28 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

spiritual knowledge follows the same law of evolu- 
tionary growth that pertains to physical form in the 
mortal life. There has to be its periods of conception, 
gestation and birth, and until the soul of man has passed 
these periods it can have no knowledge of spirituality 
of a high or even low degree. In many natures, there 
is no development of spiritual life above the plane of 
feeling during earthly life. Hearing and sight are 
dormant, and the spiritual senses are confined to one 
channel of perception only. They can feel the great 
waves of pulsating power that reach them from the 
world eternal, but they cannot correct a false impres- 
sion that may be produced by this sensation, and from 
this fact alone the world's great superstitions proceed 
in countless variety of forms. 

Spiritual knowledge that comes by feeling is about 
as high in the grade as the mentality emerging from 
the savage plane can perceive, and the interpretation 
of its influence will be expressed in a savage manner. 
The people of Christian nations are marked examples 
of this form of spiritual development, for they still 
worship a savage god, whom they suppose to be the 
parent of a merciful and benevolent son, who died to 
propitiate the father's savage and revengeful disposi- 
tion toward the human race. The people of the Chris- 
tian world are spiritual savages, save where the mild 
and beneficent ideas of the great Indian teacher, Gau- 
tama, the Buddha, have been accepted and practiced; 
but the lingering superstitions of the savage mind still 
haunt their imagination, and they regard every mani- 
festation from the world of spirit in this age to be of 
Satanic origin if it appeals to other senses than that of 
feeling. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 29 

The ignorance of the Christian clergy concerning 
spiritual matters is more dense than that of India, but 
the conceit of their half-developed minds is a striking 
comment upon the efficacy of their system to save them- 
selves from the imaginary wrath of an imaginary god. ^ 
As they were never in any danger of soul or body, ex- 
cept what they themselves have devised as existing in 
mind, it is not strange that a change of mental con- 
ception of their god should be hailed by them as evi- 
dence of having obtained favor with him, and it is often 
paraded before the world as a manifest token of spirit- 
ual acceptance by him. 

This highest wisdom of the Christian was as familiar 
to the ancient sages of India as the presence of the spir- 
itual world in the sacred circle of the temples. But the 
Christian world has no recognition of the latter evi- 
dence, and sinks in the scale of perfected spiritual power, 
although it has some in its ranks who dimly sense the 
existence of a more exalted condition of attainment 
than their present status. They not only feel the 
presence and power of the spiritual world, but the 
sense of hearing is developed to a remarkable degree, 
and the voice of the unseen thinker- reaches their inner 
power of soul, adding to the sense of feeling the fac- 
ulty of hearing, and thus the spirit has a new source 

*Here tlie spiritual teacher of the Orient expresses an idea that 
is quite in consonance with the developed thought of Europe or 
America. The enlightened mentality of the race instinctively re- 
jects the crude theological definitions of the mediaeval ages, and 
refuses to be bound by them, although they are still taught in the 
seminaries and schools of theological training. Why the West 
should still feel bound by the creeds of savage Europe or barbaric 
Asia is a mystery, except for the lack of a more perfect develop- 
ment in knowledge of spiritual laws. — B. 



30 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

of mental and spiritual enlightenment. If to this 
should come the evolution of spiritual sight and the 
vision be perfect, then the possessor of these powers 
becomes a Buddha, or spiritual sage, able to look into 
the invisible world and to perceive the secret causes 
and workings of the great forces that underlie all man- 
ifestation of being. 

To become a Buddha was the aim of the ancient re- 
ligious discipline of the Brahmin school, but the attain- 
ment of the Buddha state by the practice of ascetic 
rites, or the undue repression of the physical senses, 
was never as successful as the primitive disciples of 
that school of thought hoped it would be. Sometimes, 
indeed, the severe discipline of the body opened the 
spiritual vision prematurely, and permitted the neo- 
phyte in spiritual wisdom to perceive some of the lower 
spheres of spiritual life, which were mistaken for evi- 
dences of spiritual wisdom; but the greater knowledge 
of spiritual truths never came to the seekers for it in 
this direction, for spiritual wisdom, like its earthly 
prototype, comes by mental growth, and not by violent 
stimulus or repression of any department of individual 
experiences.* 

The Brahmins of later ages and the priesthood of the 

■"* Here agani is au idea worthy of consideration by the students 
of theosophical and esoteric thought. To force the soul from its 
balance by forced stimulation, or to repress its powers in a proper 
exercise of them in any natural manner, has ever proven detri- 
mental rather than beneficial to the practitioner of the ascetic 
rites, A true growth is always symmetrical and a false stimulus 
can only produce distortion. The fakirs and other superstitious 
devotees of "India at this age are the best evidence possible of the 
wide divergence from the primitive simplicity of the ancient 
teachers. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 31 

Christian world, who seek spiritual enlightenment of a 
high order through the cultivation of asceticism, miss 
the aim of their ambition, and enter the spiritual world 
shorn of their power to appreciate its higher grades of 
thought, and are obliged to remain upon the plane of 
earth until they learn the great lessons of spiritual un- 
foldment through obedience to the spirit of natural 
laws. 

This lesson is the most difficult for either the Brahmin 
or Christian priesthood to learn, for each imagines 
itself to be specially chosen by the Supreme Creator 
for an example of the Divine Wisdom upon the earth, 
and neither of them really have any claim by virtue of 
their order to any consideration by the Supreme Creator 
above the other castes or classes of men. 

I emphatically taught that Brahm was no respecter 
of persons and that Om was the father of all that in- 
habited the worlds, but I never authorized by word or 
deed the idea that the followers of Brahm were to have 
any higher privileges than Om bestowed upon all that 
obeyed the sacred laws. I did teach that the sons of 
Brahm should have the wisdom that belonged to the 
sacred order, which was to ever hold the truth in pu- 
rity and bestow it upon the children of men. I declared 
that the light should never be quenched in India, and if 
it declined in power I would come again to re-establish 
its pristine glory, and through Capilya and Gautama I 
fulfilled the prophecy; but the priesthood failed to un- 
derstand them, as they fail to comprehend now that all 
light of a spiritual character comes not from the indi- 
vidual who bears it to men, but through the mentality 
which, as an illuminated reflector, radiates the spiritual 
glory to the darkened minds of earth. 



32 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

Therefore, I come again in this age, speaking the 
words of warning and truth to the highest caste in In- 
dia, to no longer look for the reappearance of the an- 
cient teachers in bodily form through reincarnation of 
the spirit, but to heed the words of spiritual truth that 
come from all sources that reflect the ancient wisdom; 
for the time has come when a knowledge of spiritual 
truths is to be again bestowed upon earth without ref- 
erence or regard to the ignorance or variety of the re- 
ligious orders there that may vainly imagine they have 
a monopoly of spiritual revelation. 

The Christian world rejects the doctrines of spiritu- 
ality that do not conform to the ideas of its fictitious 
god and remains in spiritual darkness, but its condition 
is not so bad as the disciples of Brahm who have ever 
been taught that the doors of the spiritual world have 
never been closed, yet who find that they have often 
knocked in vain at its portals. 

You have been answered, O children of Brahm, ac- 
cording to the answer you have given to the children 
of earth; for in your pride of ancestry and regard for 
the external observance of .the doctrines, you have be- 
come exclusive in your thoughts; and despising others 
whose souls were as precious in the sight of Brahm as 
your own, you have been excluded from the evidence of 
that higher spiritual power that governs the universe. 

In darkness you have seen the sun of India sink 
beyond the dark waters to reappear and illuminate the 
people of the Western nations with the brilliancy of a 
new Divine Revelation. For to these nations the light 
of ancient India has again arisen, and their people are 
rejoicing in the splendor of a new spiritual philosophy 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 33 

that transcends anything ever taught in their sacred 
books. 

They appreciate its value, for to many of them it has 
come with the power of divine life, and is lifting their 
souls far above the plane of sordid materiality with 
which Christian dogma had depicted the eternal world. 
Their priesthood, indeed, refuse to receive the beneficial 
results of this great illumination; but the people of 
Europe and America, for the first time since the formu- 
lation of their religious system, are becoming enlight- 
ened as to the nature of the soul and the laws governing 
its eternal destiny. They will become the children of 
Om, as well as of Brahm, for to their material devel- 
opment they are to add the next great step in their 
evolution, viz. , the knowledge and power of the eternal 
world as an ally to their earthly existence. To them 
the sacred circle has become almost a discarded phase 
of spiritual evidence, and they seek the higher knowl- 
edge of the spirit that reflects the wisdom of ages of 
experience in the life immortal. 

O, India, that has taught the nations the wisdom of 
the Divine Word, arise again from thy lethargy, and let 
the sons of Brahm lead the way to the mental illumina- 
tion of all thy children. Dwell no longer in the dark- 
ness of the past ages, and let the altars of Siva be 
abandoned forever. He is not the angel of death, but 
the harbinger of life eternal. There is not a possibility 
of anyrsoul becoming eternally lost, for the great Om 
has provided for the redemption and preservation of all 
the children of earth. 

Teach no longer that the soul cannot escape a cease- 
less round of transmigrations ere it can be absorbed in 
4 



34 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

Brahm, for it needs no other incarnation than its first 
to become capable of existence in spirit, and when it 
Jias perfected itself in knowledge to the degree of the 
intelligence of the great world builder, it can with 
Brahm create and govern a world and yet maintain its 
separate individual existence forever. 

Let the followers of Vishnu and Siva cease to call 
upon either for spiritual aid, for to neither has there any 
power been given, and they are only expressions of 
principles that imperfect mentality has deified as per- 
;sons. Even Brahm, the creator of worlds, can only an- 
swer prayer in accord with the will of Om, to whom he 
is subject, and prayer addressed to him may be in vain. 
But, if you must have the embodied form of language to 
convey thought to the less developed mind, pray to 
none less in power than Brahm, who will answer you 
by inspiring you with the wisdom of the ancient teach- 
ers, and to their knowledge add that which they have 
learned since their transition to the world eternal. 

We will come as his messengers, and in earthly lan- 
guage record the ideas that pertain to the world spirit- 
ual, "making plain that which hitherto has been a 
mystery, and bringing to earth again the wisdom of the 
ancient sages of India. 



CHAPTEK lY. 

THE WISDOM OF THE DIVINE WOED. 

In the sacred Scriptures of the Christian nations is 
a paragraph that has been a myster^y to their most 
learned teachers, for in its translation to the Western 
language the significance of it was purposely veiled by 
the ancient sages of G-reece. 

That word which was taught to the G-reek sages of 
the Alexandrian school was the sacred title Om, by 
which the governing power of the universe was desig- 
nated in the ancient Sanscrit. In the definition of the 
lower intelligences that were ascribed to the spiritual 
rulers of the world, Brahm meant the god of earth as 
a creator of the planets, while Vishnu represented the 
preserving power that held planetary forms in exist- 
ence for a season. Siva, to whom all physical life was 
subject, was the destroyer, and as his power was equal 
with that of both Brahm and Vishnu, he became a 
part of the Hindoo triad, which still is worshiped in the 
symbols (three in one), to the disapprobation of the 
Christian world, that has copied it in all essential 
points, save that it has removed Siva to the position of 
an antagonist to both Brahm and Vishnu, and substi- 
tuted the word Holy Spirit in his place. Siva has become 
in Christian mythology, Satan or adversary, and is re- 
garded as supreme over the earth through having the 
power of death, and the early Christian fathers labored 
hard, in their ignorance of the true interpretation of 

(35) 



36 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

the term, to represent the final destruction of Siva or 
Satan by the power of their Christ. * 

Hence Christian theologians have ever been at war 
with any interpretation of Indian thought that would 
have shed light upon the origin of their theories, for 
long before the nations surrounding the Mediterranean 
sea were enlightened above the plane of savages, the 
sages of Persia and India had solved the problems of 
spiritual existence in the next sphere above the plane 
of earth. 

The G-reek philosophers, to whom the Sacred Word 
was explained, understood it quite perfectly, but the 
lower orders of the religious teachers could not com- 
prehend the existence of an impersonal power that 
transcended the authority of any embodied form, and 
so they mutilated the philosophic teachings of the an- 
cient doctrines, and inserted the idea that the Word 
was made flesh and dwelt among men. This was copy- 
ing the Hindoo doctrine of the avatars,, but they car- 
ried it further than any Indian teacher ever thought of 

* This interpretation of the Hindoo triad solves the problem of 
the symbols, in perfect accord with the facts at issue as to the ori- 
gin of the Christian trinity. In the dense ignorance of the early 
Christian priesthood the symbol of death was taken from the 
triune powers and placed in antagonism to them, while the mother- 
hood of divinity was placed in its stead. The Catholic church at- 
tribute the immaculate conception to Mary, the same as to Jesus, and 
by right the trinity should be Father, Son and Holy Mother. As 
Christ stands for Vishnu in the Hindoo cult, so Satan is the 
equivalent of Siva the destroyer. By some curious juxtaposition 
Om the Supreme was substituted for Mary, so that modern Prot- 
estant Christendom is worshiping at the shrine of a masculine 
trinity, while the devout Catholic still clings to Mary as the mother 
of his God, and supreme in her superiority over all other mothers 
of the race. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 37 

doing, for they ascribed to their incarnation the quali- 
ties of Om, and have taught ever since that in their 
Jesus the world beheld the visible author of the uni- 
verse itself. 

They unhesitatingly ascribed to this avatar all the 
qualities that India and Chaldea ascribed to Brahm, 
adding also the office of Vishnu, and in the combi- 
nation the Christian world supposes tliat it has in the 
Christ, the Om or All in all, which is the true transla- 
tion of the Word. ^ 

To the thoughtful student of Oriental metaphysical 
thought it seems strange that the Christian world 
should be so blind to the true origin of its god ideas, 
but the average European is not far enough advanced 
in the knowledge of spirit or how it is acquired to 
give credit to other nations for wisdom excelling his 
own attainments. Therefore, Europeans borrow from 
the older writings all that they have of spiritual wisdom, 
but not having a spiritual development they understand 
little of the meaning of their sacred writings, and at- 
tribute to the characters in them the qualities of soul 
that belong to their own half developed spiritual men- 
tality, t 



* Probably few words have ever puzzled the ignorant translators 
of the Sanscrit so much as this word Om, yet in the words used to 
designate Divinity we have Omnipotent, Omniscient, Omnipresent 
and Omnific, all of which the shorter Sanscrit word fully conveys 
to the mind of the devout worshiper as the highest conception of 
Divinity^ the impersonal Om. 

t This characteristic is still seen in the theological mentality of 
the Christian nations at this age. While they tenaciously cling to 
what little spiritual knowledge they have acquired in the past, 
they strenously oppose the idea of a spiritual evolution that causes 
the mind to regard their creedal definitions of spirituality as im- 



38 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

The Christian peoples in the age of the Caesars could 
not have had a high degree of spirituality, for they 
were a horde of barbarians whose highest conception of 
power was brute force, and whose chief occupation was 
war. Their descendants to this day cannot understand 
why the people of the Oriental world have such a re- 
gard for spiritual ideas, and despise them for their def- 
erence to them, but the people of the East had their 
evolution from the savage plane centuries before the 
Western nations, and attained to some degree of knowl- 
edge concerning the spiritual life and its laws long ago, 
which has never been lost by them, although subjected 
to many extra additions by ignorance or craft. 

The people of the West had their spiritual evolution 
in the sphere of animality and crime. They were never 
at peace long enough to have a generation born free of 
the taint of blood and strife, and their religious tenets 
all reflect the mental bias of a people that have never 
conceived of the greater power of peace and benevo- 
lence toward the children of men by the Divine Cre- 
ator. 

They attributed to Him the same bloody disposition 
they bred in themselves and cried unto Him to assist 
them when they marched out to battle against their 
fellow men, when the earth ran red with the blood of 
the slain who worshiped at the shrine of the same 
embodied deity whom they felicitously describe as the 
Prince of Peace. 

perfect, and remain in the atmosphere of the thought bred in the 
obscurity of the mediseval ages. Occasionallj' the creedal environ- 
ment is broken by the expanding intellectual power of the im- 
prisoned soul, but at much pain and cost to the emancipated 
mind. — B. 



THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 39 

Thus has the world been mocked by the declension 
from the ancient doctrines which said ' 'Thou shalt not 
kill;" and, as if to apologize for their violation of its 
most evident sanctity, the Christian world has em- 
bodied in their sacred writings that the Supreme Om 
delivered up to a sacrificial death the only true incar- 
nation of the Divine Essence that ever came upon 
earth. This abhorrent doctrine is still taught in their 
temple and ghastly symbols stand before their altars 
that the children of future generations may be re- 
minded at what a cost the human race could hope to 
obtain eternal happiness, and what a sacrifice was nec- 
essary for the redemption of the world. * 

There is, indeed, a practical repudiation of this idea 
by a small portion of the Christian world, but they in 
turn are repudiated by it as not Christian but Budd- 
hists in belief, and the highest wisdom of the Christian 
world in its delineation of the Divine Word ascribes to 
Him the nature of Siva or destroyer. To those who 
fail to accept the doctrines woven about their trinity, 
they have reserved the punishment and torture in the 

* The barbaric theology of Paul and Calvin is the surviving rec- 
ord of the ideas in which creedal Christianity had its primitive 
evblution. Like the fossil footprints in the rocks, it witnesses to 
the existence of that savagery that made Roman civilization a 
power in the realm of brutal forces, but which never lifted the 
mind above the plane of savage ideas concerning the nature of 
Divinity. Even now there are sermons preached and creeds read 
to familiarize the mind with the sacred mystery of the atonement 
that savage theology attributed to the Divine Nature. Nothing is 
more repulsive to the Hindoo mind than the idea of a bloody sacri- 
fice to propitiate a god, and the holding of this doctrine by the 
missionaries is the secret of the rejection of their other ideas by the 
educated Hindoos. — B. 



40 THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 

world eternal, which savages in mortal life inflict upon 
the persons of their enemies taken in war. 

These children of a savage race are invading India 
with a modification of these cruel doctrines, and are 
deriding the gods of the Hindoo faith as absurd crea- 
tions of the fancy, but what are they bringing in place 
of those which they ignore or despise ? 

Their wisest minds are uncertain of any proof of the 
existence of a spiritual world, for they declare that 
since their god departed from earth the world of spirit 
has been closed against the return of any from its dis- 
tant shores. Their creeds are iron bound in this re- 
spect, and they look in vain for his coming, for nearly 
two thousand years have departed and there is no sign 
of his existence given from the world of spirits that his 
followers may know of a surety that he still lives — a 
god to answer the cries of his worshipers. 

The supreme power with which his believers invest 
him is not exercised in their behalf, and they, like the 
heathen world, live and die, in hope of a blessed life 
or in despair of any life whatever. It is their highest 
wisdom, and while they are self-complacently asserting 
the certainty of their acceptance by the Almighty 
Power they cling to mortal life with as much tenacity 
as the most illiterate savage; or, it may be said, with 
more fear of departure, for the savage has no fear of 
his god, nor does he have any idea that the eternal 
world is a doubtful abode for the inhabitants of earth. 

The wisdom of the Divine Word in Christian nations 
is a sad departure from its primitive interpretation in 
the days of the ancient philosoj^hy. Then Om meant 
the eternal and everlasting power that governed the 
heavens and the earth, and by whom or from whom pro- 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 41 

ceeded everything that was made. He was in the be- 
ginning before the gods, and He was with the gods as 
well as the controlling power of the gods, and without 
Him was nothing made that was made. 

So far the Christian faith accords with the Hindoo 
philosopy, but when they added ' 'And the Word was 
made flesh and dwelt among us," they fabricated the 
wildest form of fictitious interpretation of the ancient 
doctrines. 

The Hindoo avatarship had a very opposite meaning 
from this Western paraphrasing of the doctrine of the 
incarnation of a god, for in the Hindoo faith a god as 
a spirit might take the form of a man and be born upon 
earth, but no Hindoo ever taught that the Supreme 
Om descended to that state. Brahm might be em- 
bodied in Brahma; Vishnu might come to earth as 
Chrishna or G-autama, and Siva might show himself 
upon earth in the form of Mahmood or Tamerlane with 
a ghastly train of the slain in his wake of victory; but 
the Supreme Om remained in the Hindoo mind beyond 
the sphere of earth or its surroundings, and it is only 
in the barbarous conceits of the savage tribes of Chris- 
tian Europe that the Ruler of the Universe was ever 
visible in mortal form. 

That such a people should be conceited enough to 
claim the final destiny of the human race to be at the 
disposal of their god is not surprising, for they have 
attempted to conquer and dispose of the whole earth as 
their personal possessions, and such minds are ever 
ambitious to be rulers in the world eternal if they 
can obtain the requisite authority over the mentally 
undeveloped. 

However, in reality the Supreme Om has wisely 



42 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

made this impossible, and the ambitious prelates and 
tyrants of the European nations have a very low posi- 
tion in the life everlasting until they emerge from the 
influence of their barbarous ideas concerning the des- 
tiny of other nations. Few among them even under- 
stand that the Divine Wisdom is attained by a spirit- 
ual evolution of the mental powers, and it is a sad fact 
that in the spiritual world the most dense ignorance of 
the laws of progress prevails among the inhabitants 
that have received their ideas from the teachings of 
Christian theologians. 

These latter guides of the uneducated masses are 
themselves unfortunate in their misconception of the 
meaning of the Word, and while endeavoring to ex- 
pound it to their hearers, are themselves sadly in need 
of some one to instruct them as to its original signifi- 
cance. No class on earth are so incompetent as these 
teachers of spiritual matters, for they have lost, or 
rather never have had, the primitive meaning of the 
terms expressed to them, and most of them are under 
the bondage of the superstition that the original 
writers of their Scriptures were men to whom came a 
direct revelation of the Supreme Om, so little do they 
know of the subject of spiritual life or its effect upon 
the life of earth.* 

* This arraignment of the teachers of Christian theology, coming 
from a Hindoo, must be fairly treated by the thoughtful mind. 
With subtle analysis of motive as well as almost supernatural 
acuteuess of perce])tion, he exposes the position of the mental 
world of Christendom as it appears to the more highly intellectual 
development of the East. Nor should the Christian complain of 
its severity, for in teaching the atonement and refusing to look 
into the claims of spiritual phenomona, the world of Christendom 
must be regarded in spirit as both cruel and ignorant by the less 
bigoted mind of the Oriental thinkers. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 43 

I have measured quite accurately the mental power 
of the wise minds of the Western nations, O children of 
Brahm, and to you, even in your declension, they are 
as infants. Even in the world of spirits their great 
teachers come to learn of the Brahmas and Buddahs 
of our nation concerning the sources of planetary crea- 
tion, for they as yet are not high enough in the grade 
to know how to make a world, and they seek our spheres 
that they may learn of the Brahmas how worlds are 
made, that they may impress their brethren yet in the 
flesh with the secrets of material creation. 

For their wisdom is only material and their highest 
knowledge pertains to earthly matters. They know 
nothing of spirit or its power over the world of matter, 
and their ignorance is so dense that some of them aver 
that worlds and their inhabitants are built by the ' 'for- 
tuitous combination of atoms," which they ascribe to 
some unknown and unknowable power from which all 
proceeds that ever exists. 

These children of the West are wise indeed in what 
they can see and measure by the physical senses, but 
when they enter the sphere of the vast, and to them, 
unknown realm of causation, they halt with uncertain 
feet upon the threshold, as if all of existence was to be 
measured and comprehended in the realm of physical 
being. Spirit that permeates the worlds universal is 
to them unknowable because in their evolution from 
the savage plane they have not come to the period of 
spiritual birth, and they cannot see causation without 
they attain this power in the physical or the spiritual 
world. Most of them never attain it in the mortal 
state and their wisest minds come to the life eternal 



44: THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

as babes in spiritual truths, which they have to learn 
ere they can ever attain to the wisdom that pertains to 
creative knowledge. * 

Therefore, the children of light need not look to these 
barbarian conquerers of the physical world for the an- 
cient wisdom, and when they come bearing the ancient 
writings which once went to them from India and 
Persia, let them be respectfully treated by the sacred 
caste, but let them understand that in things spiritual 
they are yet children whose wisdom is that of babes, 
prattling about that of which they have heard, but of 
which they are of too immature mentality to understand. 

The wisdom of the Divine Word is too deep for these 
Western missionaries to perceive with their present 
low grade of mentality. They may come with pure and 
self-sacrificing motives, but they know little or noth- 
ing of the nature of the Supreme Om, if they think 
their childish conceptions of Him are creditable to His 
character. He governs the universe as well as the 
earth, and Brahm and all the lesser gods are subject 
to His will, but He has given to none the disposal of the 
immortal natures that belong to any of His worlds. 
They are His, and to Him alone are they amenable. 
Brahmin and Sudra, Pagan and Christian, civilized or 
savage, all that live or ever shall live, are His children, 

*This allusion to the status of material scientists is too true to 
be questioned. While they have the power to go into the- material 
realm and deal, with mechanical powers and even approach the 
chemical plane upon its material environment, they seem unable 
to advance to the conception of the idea of mental forces acting 
behind all the chemical and mechanical relations to produce the 
phenomena of the universal cosmos. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 45 

and to them He bestows the knowledge of the Divine 
Word when they arrive at that stage of growth whereby 
they comprehend the meaning of immortal and eternal 
existence in their own conscious spiritual life. 



CHAPTEE Y. 

THE COMING OF THE BUDDHA TO ALL NATIONS. 

In the ancient Vedantic writings there was origin- 
ally a paragraph that has been the subject of much dis- 
cussion among the Brahmin priesthood, viz. : The 
coming to earth of the spiritually enlightened. To 
the spiritually blind this Scriptural idea has always 
been a mystery, for to the blind there is no sensation 
of light or color whereby they can compare or ascer- 
tain a truth that depends upon sight, and in the prov- 
ince of the spiritual senses this law holds equally good 
as in the sphere of physical perception. 

To explain this requires a familiarity with certain 
principles that pertain to what the material scientists 
of the Western nations call the law of evolution. In 
brief, this power of the soul of man to perceive knowl- 
edge above the plane of the physical senses depends 
upon a growth of mental faculties that are extremely 
sensitive to the finer range of power, as the eye is more 
sensitive than the ear or sense of touch to the lower 
physical realm. 

When one has the development upon the spiritual 
plane so that the corresponding senses which convey 
ideas in the physical world are capable of exercise, such 
a person is a Buddha or enlightened one, and if the de- 
velopment is very high in the powers of _ sensitiveness 
the Buddha becomes able to perceive and to teach ideas 
relative to the invisible world which are entirely be- 

(46) 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 4,'J 

yond the province of the earthly senses to perceive or 
understand. 

Because of this the tendency of the earthly disciples 
has been to apotheosize the Buddahs and to regard them 
Bs beings of a superior order, but the trlith is that all 
Buddhas are only individuals of an abnormal spiritual 
unfoldment in the physical life; and, while they may re- 
flect the wisdom of the life eternal, they are not gods to 
be worshiped or of a different nature from the rest of 
humanity. 

The Buddhas of India have always been noted for 
their strong spiritual ideality, and their lives have been 
the subject of poetry and song to such an extent that 
their true mission to the world has been misunderstood 
and often entirely misconstrued. When a Buddha is to 
be born the ante-natal conditions have to be markedly 
positive in the development of the embryotic spirit that 
is to reflect the wisdom of the life eternal. 

The parents are subjects of much interest to the in- 
visible guardians of the coming life, and the mother is 
■of special regard, for upon the mental bias of her 
thoughts at that period depends the greater problem 
•of what the mind of the child shall be. 

Consequently it is not entirely a myth that the great 
spiritual teachers of the world have had their future 
earthly mission foretold by angelic visitations to the 
mothers of the Buddhas, for nothing would or could 
have a greater impress upon the unfolding mind than 
the thought of the mother that the child was to be the 
charge of the inhabitants of the world invisible and re- 
veal its mysteries to the children of earth. 

When it is recorded in the traditions of the nation 
that the Buddhas are conceived by rays of light from 



48 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

the heavens, it is only a poetic expression of the men- 
tal bias of the recipient of heavenly wisdom, for the 
mind of a Buddha is shaped and moulded by influences 
from the world of spirits, and the mission of the Bud- 
dhas is to teach the truth concerning the spiritual world 
in the language of the people to whom they come as 
inspired messengers of truth. 

They are not incarnations of developed spirits, who 
have once lived upon the earth as men, nor are they 
spirits from other planets undergoing a new experi- 
ence in the sphere of earth, but they are able to reflect 
the wisdom of such spirits, for their mental powers are 
more susceptible to the influence of the higher life than 
that of earth, and they easily converse with spiritual 
intelligences of a very high degree of spiritual unfold- 
ment. 

This gives them the credit and appearance of being 
supernaturally endowed with wisdom, and has been the * 
basis of a mischievous error in the theology of India, 
for the appearance of a Buddha, according to the per- 
verted construction of the ancient doctrines, is tlie sig- 
nal for the apotheosizing of another person as a god. 
thus adding another to the long list of decarnated spir- 
its who are worshiped as having more power in the 
eternal world than their position there entitles them to 
possess. 

For in the life of spirit the Buddhas, however great 
they may have been upon earth, are only parts of a 
system that has for its object the general diffusion of 
spiritual light to the world of mortals. When their 
work is done upon earth they pass to their proper 
place in the life eternal, and the cries of their deluded 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 49 

but sincere followers for personal favors cannot be 
answered except upon general principles. 

The Buddhas of the world are the torch bearers of 
the world of spirit, and while they enlighten the earth 
with the knowledge of spiritual life and its laws, they 
do not make that life, nor can they control the destiny 
of the souls who enter it from any nation or sphere of 
earth. Therefore, to regard them as saviors in any 
such sense as the Christian world teaches is to place 
them in a false position in the spiritual world and re- 
tards the minds upon earth from receiving that light of 
the spirit, which would make the work of the Buddhas 
of immense value to mortals. 

India has had her generations who have rejoiced in 
the light of spiritual revelation from the Buddhas, but 
she has forgotten that the Buddhistic light was to 
shine upon all souls throughout the earth, according to 
the ancient doctrines, and when her priests suppressed 
this cardinal truth they went into that twilight dark- 
ness of mind whereby the pure light of the ancient 
Vedas was nearly obscured. 

In place of the brilliant illumination of the mind from 
the light of the highest heavens, the mental powers 
grew feeble, and instead of a recognition of the true 
principle whereby the real truth is to be ascertained, a 
false system of ascetic mortification of the flesh was 
adopted, and spiritual darkness, instead of radiant 
power, invested the Brahmin priesthood until G-autama 
appeared, the last of the greater Buddhas that has ever 
arisen in India since the age of Capilya. 

G-autama taught the greater truths of the ancient 
faiths, but he did not assail the errors as a soul of more 
5 



50 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

positive intellect would have done. He should have re- 
vealed the ancient faith in greater power, and would 
have done so had he taught the original interpretation 
of the doctrines of reincarnation and transmigration of 
the spirit from sphere to sphere after it had left the 
sphere of earth. From the failure to do this, and be- 
-cause India lies helpless at the feet of Caste, the spir- 
itual power of her people has fallen so low that the 
.shrines of millions of earth bound spirits are receiving 
the homage due the great Om, and from those shrines 
not even the ancient wisdom is reflected from the world 
of spirits, but a crude mass of superstitious decrees 
that are conceived in ignorance and gestated and born 
in craft. 

Well does this condition exemplify the ancient proph- 
ecy, that when the Buddhas cease to come the people 
shall sink in spiritual knowledge, and also does it prove 
true that each age, and even generation, should have 
its Buddha if the world would not lose its regard for 
the life eternal. 

For the Buddhahood is not attained by the mere be- 
lief in its existence. India has had its principles taught 
for centuries, but its light comes not as in the days of 
Sakya, nor do the priesthood of Benares or the rest 
of the nation dwell in that spiritual freedom that be- 
longs to the spiritually illuminated. They, like the 
Christian priests of the West, are in only a reflected 
light from the written Word, but the transcendent 
glory of a spiritual revelation of the eternal life is not 
shining upon them, as it should and would, were they 
free from the superstition of caste and dogma. 

There would be no cloud of ignorance and doubt to 
hang above the sacred altars were the ministrants at 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 51 

the altars as pure in their inner lives as their external 
garments symbolize, for the power of the spirit comes 
to those only who are pure in spirit, and the Buddha- 
hood is given to such freely. 

Therefore, it comes to those of any nation or people 
who seek its influence, but it comes not in the pride of 
caste or glory of earthly grandeur. 

Gautama obtained it by self-renunciation, and all 
souls who would have its pure light must live in its 
presence as though they stood in the sphere of Brahm, 
to whom the darkness and the light are the same. The 
sons of Brahm who seek the Buddhahood should not 
seek it in the spirit of pride or self-will. It is a sacred 
gift of the spiritual world, and in that world the spirit 
of the suppliant is the index of the power that is to be 
given. 

The Buddhas who teach are specially gifted by birth 
and spiritual instruction from the womb, but the Budd- 
has who are taught do not always receive this expe- 
rience, although they can obtain all its real benefits in 
their own lives, and become fitted thereby to obtain a 
blessed entrance into the Nirvanian heavens. 



CHAPTER YI. 

THE COMING OF THE MISSIONARIES FROM THE 
WESTERN NATIONS. 

It has ever been taught in some of the Vedantic 
traditions that the time would come when the Buddha 
light should come to the world again — not from India, 
but from the Western world that sat in darkness and 
the valley of the shadow of death. 

Compared with the spiritual light that anciently- 
shone over India's plains, that of Europe is of the 
crudest character, for her greatest minds were never 
able to perceive the universality of spirit, and they are 
yet in the spiritual darkness that belongs to the first 
stages of a spiritual unfoldment. 

Still the teachers of those nations have been able to 
sense the pulsations of the great spiritual force that 
governs the universe, and in their crude conceptions of 
its power have supposed that they have perceived all 
of its principles, and have adopted in essence the con- 
clusions of the ancient Indian faith, viz. : that the su- 
preme Brahm has had one incarnation. 

How the Supreme could become a mortal they have 
never tried to explain, but some of their priests have 
written in their sacred books that it was so, and upon 
that basis the present religious worship of the Western 
nations is established. In reality, this theory of" the 
incarnation of the Supreme is but a transfer of the 
Indian avatarship, or the coming to earth of Vishnu as 
a spiritual force, but such is the ignorance of the 

(52) 



THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 53 

Christian world regarding the religious ideas of other 
nations that it imagines itself to be the chosen channel 
of all the spiritual light that has ever come to earth. 
It was in consequence of this ignorance that the people 
of the West pushed out their missions to the so-called 
heathen nations, and had their wisdom been in any 
degree equal to their zeal, they might have done a great 
work of good to the nations of the East, but the Chris- 
tian world made the mistake of copying the errors as 
well as the truths of the systems from which their faith 
was taken, and in so doing became shorn of that power 
for good which their efforts deserved. 

They found that the East, from which they bor- 
rowed all the spiritual light they ever have had, under- 
stood better than themselves the origin of the doc- 
trines and they have only succeeded to a limited de- 
gree in attracting attention to their work. 

The Christian missionary has ever had an invisible 
but powerful foe to contend with in his work in India. 
The mighty hosts of India that have been and are still 
linked with the mental atmosphere of earth, through a 
misunderstanding of the doctrine of reincarnation, 
have ever been exerting a silent, but positive, influ- 
ence upon the minds of the natives against the recep- 
tion of the Christian theories of spirit, and they have 
wisely done this, for the Christian theories are in the 
main erroneous in nearly all essential points regarding 
the nature of the soul and its destiny. To change the 
superstitions of Hindooism for the equally supersti- 
tious theories of Christianity would do no good, and 
until the superstitions of both are discarded India can- 
not rise very high in the scale of spiritual unfoldment. 

The Christian missionary has his work to do in In- 



54 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

dia, but it is not to convert the people of that country 
to his theories of religion. He is sent there and sus- 
tained by a certain grade of spiritual power, but it is 
rather that the observer of spiritual powers may per- 
ceive that behind all the religious systems of earth is a 
universal principle that works out through all nations 
the same essential results, and that each nation reflects 
to some degree the wisdom and beneficence of the Al- 
mighty purpose in human existence. For the nations 
of the West are but the children of the East in spiritual 
knowledge and their religious ideas are the fruit of the 
wisdom of the Eastern world transferred to new condi- 
tions that it may have a new expression in the process 
of a new mental evolution of the race. 

The Western nations were never spiritual in their 
primal life. Egypt, the mother of their civilization, 
was crude and material in her conceptions of immortal 
existence. Greece and Rome were never able to go 
very high in the grade of a spiritual unfoldment, al- 
though Greece, through her philosophy, imparted some 
of the wisdom she received from the Oriental world. 
Rome was material and cruel, but while her mission 
was to subdue the barbarian hordes of Europe, she 
never rose above the grade of material force in her 
concepts of a spiritual life. When her temporal power 
was withdrawn from the surrounding nations she 
sought supremacy by cultivating the superstitious nat- 
ure of the people, and through that channel sought to 
maintain her jurisdiction over the nations of the West. 
But her spiritual power was supported by the ignorant 
and crafty in the spiritual world and her rule upon 
earth was bloody and deceitful. 

The highest light she ever could attain was by the 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 55 

lurid flames of persecution, and her mental vision peo- 
pled the world eternal with the hosts of the devils 
damned, over whom the Siva of the Indian trinity 
reigned supreme. There was no light in her creed, 
and she has never been able to perceive the senseless 
folly of supposing that the Supreme Om would ever 
intrust to such incompetent hands the work of enlight- 
ening a w^orld as to the nature of its origin or a knowl- 
edge of its destiny. 

Rome, the parent of modern Christianity, is the 
harlot of the spiritual world. She debases and degrades 
all that pertains to the subject, and from her seat upon 
the seven hills pollutes the fountains of spiritual truth 
with deliberate design. 

From the time when her ancient priests perverted 
the great truths that came from India, through the 
missions of the disciples of Gautama, Rome has been 
the deliberate thief of ideas and the dispenser of fabri- 
cations concerning the spiritual world. She is the 
source from which the Western world take their em- 
bodied thought, and she is the only earthly channel 
through which any knowledge was allowed to reach the 
Western nations for a thousand years. 

All the writings that belonged to the sacred classics 
were under her manipulation, and the Western nations 
were fed upon spiritual falsehood as truth, until they 
knew not whether the foundation of their faith was laid 
in truth or upon a substructure of fabrication. Her 
priests were cunning and subtle, but their work 
was false, and were it not for the eternal nature of 
truth, and the ability of the lovers of truth in the world 
of spirits to reach earth through the Buddhahood, the 



56 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

Western world would remain in spiritual darkness for 
^countless generations. 

Even as it is, the work of enlightenment will be 
iiedious, for the minds of the West have been so long fed 
upon spiritual error and falsehood that the truth is dis- 
tasteful to most of them, and they reject it when pre- 
sented. 

It is not because they prefer darkness to light, but 
because in their mental growth they have been de- 
barred from a perception of spiritual knowledge, and 
in their ignorance they blindly follow the leadership of 
their blind guides to that extent that neither of them 
reach the pathway that leads to spiritual wisdom. Such 
is the spiritual leadership of the Romish form of the 
Christian theory of a spiritual life; and now we turn to 
the Protestant form of the faith to see what that pre- 
sents for India to accept. 

Protestant Christians have the foundation of their 
faith in the same traditions of the avatarship as their 
Romish progenitors. On that question they are equally 
agreed and equally in error. They broaden the field of 
Christian effort, but have no provision for those that 
are unfortunate enough to doubt the truth of their 
dogmas. They, too, limit the goodness and power of 
the Supreme Om to provide for the myriads whose 
spiritual existence is as much a necessity as their own, 
and ascribe to the governor of the universe the malig- 
nity of a fiend toward those who reject the doctrines 
that are recorded in the books; consequently, the Prot- 
estant world of Christianity is, and must be, bound by 
the limits their theologians have devised, and cannot 
rise to that conception of the universal power that pro- 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 57 

vides for all created life. It is narrow and will re- 
main so until the intellectual power of its believers is 
developed to that degree that enables them to perceive 
the Supreme Om has made provision for all the children 
of men in his majestic benevolence and almighty power. 

The missionaries of the Western world have not as 
yet arisen to this recognition of the Creator of the 
Universe. What, then, have they to offer to India that 
India has not already obtained in the province of spirit- 
ual thought. The answer is this: India had ignored 
the principles of the ancient faith, and her people were 
going down into spiritual darkness. The barbarian 
minds of the West had taken a modified degree of the 
light which India had transmitted to the West, and by 
its return the people, who were losing their knowledge 
and faith in the power of spiritual enlightenment, were 
thus reminded that all nations had an inheritance in 
the life eternal. The Western missionaries brought 
back the light that Gautama had transmitted to them, 
and the Vedantic prophecy, that light should come from 
the West, had its first fulfillment in the coming of the 
missionaries who supposed they were bringing to the 
East a knowledge of life and immortality. 

The missionary knew nothing of the real power that 
inspired him to this work, but with blind zeal he set 
out upon his mission and in honest ignorance thought 
he was led by the Spirit of his God to preach the truth 
to a people who were dwelling in dense spiritual dark- 
ness. 

He was often met with great opposition, but not 
from any other motive than disregard for his ignor- 
ance of Indian thought. He has made no serious in- 
roads as yet upon Hindoo superstitions, and will not, 



58 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

for they are to be dispelled by the influx of light from 
the Hindoo heavens rather than the Christian, as the 
latter is of too doubtful a character to bestow much il- 
lumination upon the inhabitants of their own lands, 
whereas to the Hindoo world in spirit is delegated the 
task of enlightening the world of both spirits and mor- 
tal with the knowledge of spiritual life in all its gra- 
dations. 

For the Christian world is not spiritual, but material, 
and its ideas of the life eternal are nearly all erron- 
eous. It thinks itself the favored recipient of spiritual 
revelation, yet had it not appropriated the spiritual 
doctrines of the Oriental world, it would have been en- 
tirely destitute of any revelation whatever. The peo- 
ple of the Western nations were never high enough in 
the scale of mental unfoldment to have a clear idea of 
the source of spiritual revelation, and, save a limited 
number, have no perception of the real truth concern- 
ing their own doctrines. They cannot discern spiritual 
ideas for they have no spiritual insight; and, although 
they can feel the influx of spiritual power, they know 
not its source and blindly follow it in a superstitious 
manner or reject it altogether. Therefore, India has 
nothing to hope for from them and their missionaries, 
for with the good they bring they also fail to under- 
stand that they are spiritually blind and the Supreme 
Om has not favored them more than others with a true 
revelation. 

In fact, the Western nations are just coming to a 
knowledge of the existence of a spiritual birth, which 
was taught in India ages ago. It comes to them with 
the vivid reality of a revelation, but the priesthood of the 
West is so ignorant of its source that they have banded 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 59 

themselves to oppose it, and, if possible, prevent the 
people from being influenced by it. They cannot con- 
trol this power, therefore they oppose it; but it will 
spread in spite of their antagonism, and in time will 
serve to illumine its people with a knowledge of spiritu- 
ality free from the superstitious ideas that now are a 
portion of its dogmas. 

The missions of the Western world to India are a part 
of a great spiritual movement to familiarize the people 
of earth with each others ignorance of the principles of 
eternal life. No religion that holds sway on earth has 
any intrinsic merit of its own, and all of them are re- 
flections of" the more or less crude mentality of the 
different races or tribes. Most of the formulated sys- 
tems are the work of ignorance and craft, and while 
they serve their purpose as a power to keep the minds 
of people from utterly forgetting the ideas of spiritual 
life, they have little influence in determining the status 
of the soul in that life. 

The most ascetic Brahmin may imagine himself to be 
of more importance than his Buddhist or Christian 
neighbor, but when he touches the shores of the eternal 
world he will find his asceticism or caste is a barrier or 
obstacle to that spirit of fraternization which belongs 
to the higher spiritual development, and many of them 
will be compelled to wander among the spirits of the 
earth bound, where caste is recognized as a controlling 
power. 

The Christian priest who teaches that only those who 
accept his god can be saved will have for his compan- 
ions those who teach a smmilar creed, but the vast host 
of intelligent and philosophic souls who have lived 
above the power of creed will let the Christian heavens 



60 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

fight out their battles of thought without participating 
in the bloodless strife. Those who prefer to cling to 
the blood stained altars of Kali* will. enter the kingdom 
of savage spirits who have not yet outgrown the prim- 
itive worship of ancestral ignorance, and those who 
have mistaken the symbols of the phallus for objects of 
worship will have the spirits of bulls and swine for 
companions in the world eternal, until they learn that 
the life of the soul is not to be wasted in brutal sen- 
suality. 

India went into spiritual darkness when she took 
the images for objects of divine worship, and the mis- 
sionaries are doing a good work when they point to 
the results of idolatrous worship, for if the imagery is 
not explained to the mind it becomes an obstacle to the 
perfect understanding of the idea represented by it. 

The linga and the phallus were originally the sym- 
bols of the source of visible life, but they were not de- 
signed to be objects of worship or to excite the lustful 
passions. The triple deities were designed to repre- 
sent the equality of all the powers of nature, viz. : Crea- 
tion, preservation and destruction, or birth, life and 
death; but they were not images of embodied deities in 
the original symbols, although in after ages they were 
worshiped as such. 

The lesser deities that were taught as having juris- 
diction over mortals were but the disembodied spirits 
of the savage and barbarous tribes who sought through 

*Kali is one of the ancient goddesses of India, who is still wor- 
shiped with blood sacrifices. She belongs to the most ancient cult, 
and is represented as a black female. Probably she is a survivor 
of the transition of the worship, from otfering human sacrifices to 
the substitution of animals in their place. 



THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 61 

the power of spirit return to preserve their power upon 
earth by worship, but they had no real power in the 
world of spirits to become gods or to control the affairs 
of men. 

Often have the wise men of India warned its people 
that their deities were powerless to help them, and 
that not Brahm, but Om, was to be the object of their 
homage; but the warning was not heeded, and India 
has sunk in power, both of body and mind, as she pros- 
trates herself before the spiritual gods of the lesser 
grades. 

The Western nations that overthrew the worship of 
their old gods of the lesser rank and embodied their 
worship in one form were wiser in this than if they had 
clung to the worship of the lesser spirits, for they re- 
leased the latter from their hold upon the earth and at 
the same time broke the chains which bind souls to 
earth who wish to be worshiped there as heroes or 
gods.* Therefore, although the missionaries have in- 
vaded India with their crude god, or another form of 
the Buddhist worship, they have brought with them a 
powerful body of spirits who have entered the shrines 
of the ancient temples and are releasing the earth 
bound spirits there from their hold upon the altars and 
teaching them that the pathway to a state of spiritual 
blessedness is not in seeking worship, but in escaping 
from it. 

*This is a most singular statement of the effect of concentrating 
the minds of people upon any one as a god. If it be true no greater 
misfortune can befall a spirit than to have fame or attention from 
the minds of people on earth. What a hopeless sense of help- 
lessness a mind must have that is the center of the thought of 
millions, yet unable to transcend the laws of individual soul de- 
velopment, no matter how intense the agony of the suppliant. — B. 



62 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

The missionaries will not convert mortals so much as 
release spirits, and while from the world of spirits we 
would reach the priesthood with the truth about the 
Christian dogmas, at the same time we would say that 
it is not wise to continue to worship the spirits as gods 
nor to call upon them to aid in a work that properly 
belongs to the soul to do for itself. 

Further than this there is no more sacred revelation 
from the world of spirit to be made to either Brahmin 
or Christian. There will be plenty of spiritual revela- 
tions, but not for the purpose of confirming the super- 
stitions that have arisen since the days of the ancient 
teachers. You may expect that the gods that speak 
now will explain the past and instruct for the future, 
but the day for the claim of revelation from the Su- 
preme Om is past, save as he reveals through the 
process of natural law. 

Thus, O sons of Brahm, should you answer the teach- 
ers of the Western world: "We know your gods for 
we gave them to you. We know how the voice of the 
Supreme speaks, for we heard his words and gave them 
to you. We know who your angels and spirits are for 
we had them long ere you knew of them, and while 
they may be gods to you they are no longer to be 
called gods by us. You have come to us as bearers of 
good tidings, for which we give you thanks; but we 
sent the ideas to you first, and if the message does you 
good we know that it is the same for you as for all 
nations. 

"But we also know that you received it from us, 
and if Om has spoken to us as well as you, boast not 
as if you had more than we. Learn what India has to 
teach in all her symbols ere you judge her harshly, and 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 63 

look well that she who long ago taught of the soul can- 
not teach you much of the spiritual life of which as yet 
you know nothing. " 

Thus answer the teachers of the West in wisdom, O 
sons of Brahm. 



CHAFTEK YII. 

THE INFLUX OF ORIENTAL IDEAS AMONG THE WEST- 
ERN NATIONS. 

Scarcely had the missions of the West been estab- 
lished throughout the East than there came to the peo- 
ple of Europe and America a strange manifestation of 
power from the world of spirit. It was heralded by no 
prophetic order, and it utterly refused to obey or affili- 
ate with the religious ideas that had become so firmly 
fastened upon the mind of the Christian nations that 
they were esteemed to be the only religious ideas based 
upon truth. 

The Christian world at first received the phenomena 
with incredulity and wonder, but as time elapsed began 
to regard it with undisguised hostility and open antag- 
onism. The reason of this treatment of a great phe- 
nomenal fact was that the intelligence that came from 
the spiritual world refused to indorse the theories of 
the Christian priesthood as spiritual truth, and the 
latter soon placed themselves in battle array against 
any attempt to further enlighten the world through 
such a source. 

In taking this course, the Christian priesthood only 
followed the process whereby the priests of all. religions 
seek to preserve their power; for the priests of the 
religious systems are the spiritual tyrants of the world, 
or if pure motives govern them, the natural born in_ 
structors of things pertaining to the spiritual nature. 

In the Western nations the spiritual evolution of its 
(64) 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 65 

tribes was much retarded by the primitive savagery 
and bloody barbarism of the people. Europe especially 
was far behind the Oriental world in its spiritual growth, 
and its people were incapable of comprehension of 
spiritual truth for many centuries previous to the 
Christian era, and were in gross darkaess for subse- 
quent generations. Its priesthood was ignorant and 
degraded; it was incapable of comprehending or teach- 
ing the subtle principles of the spiritual life, and a 
crude jargon of ideas regarding the life of this world 
and the other filled the minds of both priest and people. 
The writings that their chief teachers had stolen or 
copied from the Oriental world were pronounced to be 
of Divine origin, and millions of spirits went from earth 
to the spirit world firmly believing that they alone had 
an inheritance in the life eternal, from which all other 
people were to be excluded. 

The practical effect of this dogma upon the mortals 
of the Christian nations was to impress them with in- 
ordinate pride and vanity, and they taught and firmly 
believed that to them only had copcie any revelation of 
the true nature of life and all other nations were sub- 
jects of the vindictive wrath of the Almighty. 

Such being the status of Christian dogma, there 
arose a purpose of better instruction concerning the 
life of the spirit among the sages of the so-called heathen 
world, and they first instructed some of the more intel- 
ligent European and American spirits in the principles 
that govern spiritual and material relations, whereby 
the latter were able to introduce to the people of their 
countries the spiritual phenomena that had been for 
ages a familiar subject of Oriental observation. The 
6 



QQ THE TRUE THEOSOPHT. 

people of the West thought it at first a system of spir- 
itual revelation that could be utilized for material advan- 
tages, and have valued it or discarded it proportionate to 
its availability in the accumulation of material wealth. 

With the short-sightedness of their ignorant disre- 
gard of principle, many of their leaders of thought 
have been secret believers in the new ideas and at the 
.same time open opponents of their propagation, on the 
ground that the people were not ready for the truth 
and had better be left to work on in the old error until 
they had ascertained the truth by personal experience. 

These Christian prelates who so violently oppose the 
possible admission of the spiritual world to a recogni- 
tion as a sentient reality forget that their whole sys- 
tem had its foundation in similar phenomena, and in 
their blind zeal to exclude the light from the world are 
deliberately closing the avenues of the mind from re- 
ceiving the only knowledge of a spiritual kind that is 
worth obtaining, and thereby hold the mental powers 
upon the old plane of fabulous tradition or crafty fab- 
rication. 

Such is the true status of the Christian theologians of 
this age. They have filled the world of mortals with 
the most absurd tales about the Divine Nature and its 
attributes, for they have no perception of the source of 
their dogmas. They have filled the heavens of Europe 
with myriads of earth bound souls who cannot rise 
above the idea that they are the only saved people in 
existence, yet whose mentality is so low that they can- 
not understand the first idea of spiritual progress, or 
by what steps they can free themselves from the pas- 
sions and influence of earth. 

In the influx from the Oriental world the first meas- 



THE TRUE THE080PHY. 07 

ures necessary were to emancipate the Western mind 
from the slavish fear or regard for the priestly orders. 
Consequently the mind of the thinkers became of a 
skeptical turn, and the first result of their liberty was 
iconoclastic zeal in destroying the barriers to mental 
progress that craft and superstition had erected. 
Many of the most talented minds of the West were 
termed infidel by their Christian neighbors, not be- 
cause they were false to any principle, but because 
they were too intelligent to be imposed upon by the 
fabrications of the Christian priesthood. 

The latter raged and cursed in vain, for they no 
longer had the support of the physical power through 
the civil law to enforce their bloody edicts against the 
growth of mind, which has always been deemed heret- 
ical, and the infidel, or rather the intelligent mind of 
the West has made far more progress in mental and 
spiritual evolution than their superstitious traducers. 

Now, it is a principle in the relations of spiritual and 
mortal life that the mentality in either world follows in 
parallel lines, and that the progress of one mind from 
one plane to another affects all souls upon either plane, 
so that when a person gets a new idea his expression 
of it either in language or thought sets a current of 
mental force in motion that extends to every soul or 
spirit within the radius of its sphere of influence. 
Hence, when the Oriental world in spirit began to send 
its thoughts upon the Western nations, the souls in 
sympathy with the ideality taught, caught up the 
thoughts and sent them reverberating through both the 
spiritual and mortal worlds. 

The Christian world in both spiritual and mortal con- 
ditions felt the shock most, for it had such an inferior 



68 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

growth of spiritual perception that it supposed itself 
to be the most intelligent in spiritual knowledge of all, 
not even knowing its own ignorance. Hence, in its 
ignorance it opposed the influx of light, both in spirit 
and mortal life, and while its inhabitants of the spirit 
world are using the natural laws governing the two con- 
ditions, they carefully conceal from their mortal com- 
patriots their true nature, and the latter, feeling their 
influence, suppose it to be the direct influx of the Holy 
Spirit, or the third person of their Trinity. 

Those who have ever attended the places of Christian 
worship, where the devotees work themselves up to a 
great pitch of excitement* in calling upon their god, 
will notice the similarity of their emotions to those of 
the dervishees, who, in their ecstacy of excitement, 
suppose themselves to be in the direct embrace of their 
god; and, in fact, the same cause lies at the foundation 
of the phenomena in each, viz. : ignorance of the laws 
of spiritual influx that opens the mind to sensations 
above the plane of the physical sense merely. 

The opening of the doors of the world of spirit to the 
people of the Western nations was the signal of an 
irruption of the vast hord of ignorant and crude spirit- 
ual beings that had been sent from these nations into 

*This explanation of the revival influence that attends the 
labors of many Christian teachers accords perfectly with the Ori- 
ental doctrine of thought transference upon the different planes 
of spirit. The mentality of the soul upon any plane always re- 
sponds to any influence that belongs to that plane, and as the 
Christian planes of thought vary, the various sects naturally corre- 
spond with the different grades. Philosophic minds do not regard 
the exhibition of mental excitement as of any great importance 
or evidence of any operation of the supernatural order, as do the 
ignorant. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 69 

the spirit world before they had had time to outgrow 
the errors of their earthly lives, and the advent of their 
return to earth was soon seen in the gross ignorance 
and contradictory statements made by them relative to 
the life in the world of spirits. 

Especially was this observed among the believers in 
the deity of their incarnated god, for the inhabitants of 
the Christian world of Europe were in such a chaotic realm 
of intellectual thought that they failed lamentably in 
realization of their hopes of a future life. Their Savior 
was not, as they had been taught, the ruler of the world 
eternal, and aside from a band of ambitious prelates, 
who had arranged spectacular representations of their 
god, there was nothing existent in the world of spirits 
that corresponded with their religious ideas of earth. 

They sought in vain for that embodied representative 
of the Almighty, which they had so boastingly paraded 
before the people of other nations as their god, and the 
only god ever incarnate, but they found that person- 
ality of gods has no recognition ' in spiritual life, and 
that individual development only was the criterion of 
spiritual judgment. 

The spirit inhabitants of the nations of the West 
were intellectually paralyzed by this discovery, and 
struggled for centuries to realize its meaning, often re- 
verting to the mental atmosphere of earth, and there 
fortifying themselves anew by contact with their ignor- 
ant earthly brethren, who in turn, feeling the influx of a 
spiritual power they could not understand, supposed 
that they had a spiritual recognition from their god, and 
that in this manner he was fulfilling the promises re- 
corded in their sacred books. Thus, from generation 
to generation, the people of the Christian world have 



70 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

deluded themselves with the fallacious hope that they 
alone have a knowledge of spiritual life and general 
jurisdiction over the eternal world. 

It will be observed by critical students of the Chris- 
tian religion that it is based upon a claim of delegated 
authority from the Supreme Om, and that their incar- 
nate god transferred this authority to visible represen- 
tatives, who have power to control the nations of the 
earth and dictate what shall be taught as truth, and 
what shall be prohibited. * 

This claim of supreme authority has been exercised 
to neutralize, as far as possible, the revelations of truth 
from the spiritual world that transcend or explain the 
dogmas of the Christian religion, and intercourse with 
the world of spirits has been forbidden by the Chris- 
tian priesthood of all denominations, not because such 
intercourse is impossible, but because it reveals the 
false foundations upon which all religions rest, viz. : 
ignorance of the true relations between the two condi- 
tions of life. 

In a substitution of truth for the errors of religions 
there can be no priesthood having any authority to 
dictate what is or is not*to be taught as spiritual truth ; 
for, as the spiritual life is an evolution from the physi- 
cal life, its progressive unfoldment will give different 
revelations from age to age, so that the priesthood of 

*This peculiarity of the Christian system is not entirely confined 
to it, as there are similar sentiments held by some other great relig- 
ions. It probably can be traced to the mentality awakened to 
the realization of the existence of a spiritual world, but not fully 
cognizant of the principles d(miinant there. Especially is this the 
case where the worship of some great teacher of spiritual ideas as 
a god prevails. Even the followers of Brahma and Buddha in this 
age are tinctured with it. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 71 

one generation, or their ideas, cannot be authority for 
those of succeeding ages.* Those priests or those ideas 
that belong to a forgotton past will be outgrown if the 
people of earth do not seek to perpetuate them by a 
rigid repression of the growing intellectual life of 
childhood, and it is here that the priesthoods of earth 
have exerted their power to the detriment of the race. 
They have held the mind of the people upon the plane 
of a childish regard for themselves as the chosen repre- 
sentatives of the Almighty Power, and in doing so have 
prevented that growth of intellectual vigor that belongs 
to spirituality of a high order, and the minds of both 
priest and people have been retarded in their spiritual 
development. India and Europe both show this to a 
marked degree, for each has in its spiritual literature 
numberless superstitions that degrade and dwarf the 
intellect as well as betoken a mind of childish ignor- 
ance. 

When the Oriental world of spirit first sent its power 
into the Christian heavens, the darkness was so dense 
there that anything like an intelligent communication 
between the two spiritual spheres was entirely un- 
known, for the Christian world in spirit was powerless 
to do more than send an influence, which its correlative 
on earth supposed emanated from the Supreme Spirit. 
It was in vain that their philosophers tried to reach 
the world of mortals, for Christian superstition sup- 
posed that all intercourse of an intelligible character 

*One is often struck with the sublime egotism that seems to be 
a part and parcel of the priestly character in all nations. Standing 
as they do, the visible representatives of the Supreme Power, the 
very thought of their office seems to impregnate the mentality of 
the individual, and he can hardly help developing the traits of his 
God idea. 



72 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

was Satanic, and even to this day their chief teachers 
;so regard it. It was only when the advanced philo- 
■sophic minds in spirit had learned how to use the powers 
■of nature aright that intellectual spirituality dawned 
upon the Western nations, and a little light was sent 
upon that self-conceited and spiritually blinded people. * 

Like other nations, some were either dazzled by its 
illuminating power or blinded by its effulgence, and 
straightway tried to establish a priestly hierarchy 
over its recipients, but so far in vain. 

This source of spiritual power owes nothing to earth 
and cares nothing for its childish expedients to control 
or formulate it into a series of doctrines. Mortals may 
seek to perpetuate a knowledge of spiritual truth through 
the old channels, but the world of spirit can open new 
avenues at will, and its present work is to dispel the 
darkness in which ancient superstitions are bred — not 
to originate a new series to curse the children of earth. 
Therefore, the ardent apostles of the new revelation 
need not think that it will be retarded by opposition 
or seriously benefited by their indorsement. It stands 
upon a different basis than the old religious systems, 
and while it explains them, has nothing in common with 
them as far as instituting creedal fetters for the soul. 

The Christian world has arrayed itself in open hos- 
tility, through its priesthood, to the influx of light from 

* The theories put forth by some of the writers upon the nature 
of the soul show this same trait, even to this day; for the moment 
the question arises as to the inception of soul life, the only answer 
is a repetition of the Oriental idea, that the spirit comes from God 
and returns to God in the ages of existence after death. That it 
holds a self-conscious eternity of progressive life unfoldment has 
been ignored by many teachers of both Oriental and Christian 
schools of thought. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 73 

the spiritual world, and must take the consequences of 
such a foolish antagonism. Its priesthood are of all 
men the most to be pitied rather than censured, for 
they are so dcDsely ignorant of spiritual thought out- 
side of their spurious creeds as not to be held account- 
able for their childish ideas about the nature of the 
soul or the destiny of the spirit.* 

I have alluded to their ignorance of the basic ideas 
of their own religion, and the tenacity with which they 
cling to the fabulous origin of their G-od-man. They 
little realize that not a distinguishing feature of their 
system is original, but even their gods are the recon- 
structed myths of India and Egypt. Their Trinity is 
a travesty upon the Hindoo Triad with Om in place of 
Siva, whom (Siva) they regard as the adversary" of life 
and wisdom. Their scriptures are the stolen writings 
of the sages of the Oriental world, and their sacred 
oracles the treasured wisdom of those persons who were 
spiritually developed enough to have more or less in- 
tercourse with the lower spheres of the spiritual world. 
Of these they have made their gods, and without these 
they would be still worshiping at the shrines of Thor 
and Odin, or in the bloody rites of the Druids and the 
cruel deities of the nations bordering the Mediterranean. 

For these nations of the West were savage devotees 
of Moloch and Baal long after the altars of India were 

'^The Christian priesthood are not alone to be censured for their 
ignorance of the spiritual nature. Even some of the theosophical 
schools of India are teaching the annihilation of the spiritual 
entity as a possibility, where by successive rebirths the soul cannot 
attain a good Karma. Those who imagine that conscious life can 
be annihilated, once- having had its inception through planetary 
relations, little know of the eternal relation of the universal 
powers of life. 



74 • THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

purged of human sacrifice, and the remains of that 
bloody worship are seen in the sacrificial oblation 
which the Christian world believes was the culmina- 
tion of Deific wrath and vengeance. To the intelligent 
observer such ideas have their true origin in the 
crude superstitions of savages, but these Western na- 
tions still teach it as the final resource of Deific wisdom 
to redeem a world, and it is no wonder that from the 
life eternal the first information that ever came in this 
modern age refuted such a monstrous libel upon the 
Divine Beneficence. 

The believers in such ideas are necessarily tinctured 
with savagery, and their greatest glory is to rule or 
destroy. Hence the Christian world of mortals is- 
devoted to war and conquest, nor do they value justice 
and truth except as they can dispense both; for their 
god, Jehovah, is, like themselves, arbitrary and bloody, 
remorseless and cruel to those who refuse to obey his 
behests. The introduction of ideas from the world of 
spirits denounced these crimes. as worthy of judgment, 
and declared them to be no less than murder and false- 
hood. The conquest of the weak by the powerful was 
stigmatized as robbery, and the brutal treatment of 
the defenseless by the conqueror the evidence of a 
savage and barbarous disposition that stamped its pos- 
sessor with the stigma of disgrace. 

India has had her full share of the practical results 
of European Christianity, and when her people seek a 
new faith it will not be one that needs the moral sup- 
port of sword and cannon to commend it to her people. 

There is a land where the people of a professed 
Christian name have had an evolution that is more in 
harmony with spiritual ideas as they actually exist in 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 75 

the life of spirit. That land has no outward symbol 
of priest or king, and its people stand on an equality 
before the laws. To this people came the spiritual reve- 
lations of this age, and there are such exhibitions of 
spiritual power in all its phases as have not been re- 
corded since the time when the Vedantic writings were 
given. 

This people are the Buddhists of the Christian name, 
but they draw their best religious ideas from all lands 
and all peoples. Over that land has descended the 
spiritual aura like a silvery cloud of light, and the 
ancient glory of India is enveloping its nobler minds 
with celestial radiance. She is the friend of the op- 
pressed of all nations, and to her let India appeal when 
the time comes for the return of the celestial messen- 
ger that shall bring again her ancient glory, according 
to the Vedantic prophecies. 



CHAPTER YIII. 

THE TRUE HISTORY OF THE CHRISTIANS' GOD. 

To the students of the Indian Scriptures there has 
always been a different interpretation of the symbols 
than that given by the scholarship of the West, and 
because of the ignorance of the latter the true history 
or even appreciation of Indian thought is an inscrutable 
mystery to the European mind. India long ago per- 
ceived the essential unity of life, and all her great 
teachers based their doctrines upon its sacred invio- 
lability. It was taught in India before the Grecian 
sages came to learn of the soul, that the spiritual nature 
was eternal, and that change of condition did not anni- 
hilate the life principle. Upon this foundation Indian 
philosophy rested, and all the various sects that have 
arisen have never disputed its essential truth. The 
Brahmins, by virtue of their superior wisdom, were the 
first to formulate a theological system of social privilege 
and became the exponents of the religious ideas that 
they desired the people to receive, but the Brahmin 
caste, as a class, never was able to attain that profound 
spiritual knowledge that can only be obtained by those 
who have attained the Buddha state, and their exposi- 
tions of spirituality fell far below the higher grades of 
Divine enlightenment. 

The followers of Brahm became the observants of 
form, rather than possessors of spiritual power through 
a worthy motive, but lost rather than gained spirituality; 
for to be spiritual, requires not only the subordination 

(76) 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 77 

of the flesh to the spirit but the evolution of the spirit 
itself, which may or may not take place parallel with 
the period of physical life. 

When the principles of the Brahmins were carried to 
the West by the ancestor of the Israelites the system of 
caste was transferred also, and upon the shores of the 
Western sea a nation was formed that held some of the 
doctrines of the East in its religious system, but they 
had been more or less corrupted by the admixture of 
the religions of the surrounding nations. 

Notably among these doctines was a perverted inter- 
pretation of the avatarship of India, which the learned 
priests of that country had changed into an earthly 
monarch who should "rule the nations with a rod of 
iron and dash them in pieces as a potter's vessel," 
while the favored disciples of the true religion would 
be the rulers of the other nations of the earth. 

All these Messianic prophecies had long before been 
recorded in essence by the spiritual teachers of India, 
and they originally meant, that when the earth needed 
a spiritual teacher who should be able to teach the truth, 
such a teacher should come who would be able to dis- 
cern and proclaim the ideas that governed the spiritual 
world ; for as the eternal life was a sequence of the 
earthly, so its power could be made to appear upon 
earth to instruct the people there as to their destin}^ 

But these ideas came to people familiar with material 
power who never had a spiritual evolution, and who de- 
pended upon tradition for their authority. Thus the 
people of that nation were ever looking for the leader- 
ship of a material character, and oblivious of the spiritual 
meaning underlying their sacred books and symbolism. 

This people, however, had some of the most ancient 



78 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

writings of the Oriental world, and they treasured 
them with much reverence, although they did not com- 
prehend their spiritual meaning, but there were some 
minds that were never quite satisfied with the interpre- 
tation of the symbolism or the traditional rendering 
of the writings themselves. 

Among these was a man named Joschu, or Joshua, 
who was quite a teacher of the mystic symbolism upon 
a new basis, and he, being familiar with the true life of 
the spirit, declared that the priests and scribes of the 
law were ignorantly giving the people a false interpre- 
tation. So strenuous was he as to their inability to 
interpret the writings, that he aroused their wrath, 
which finally culminated in his death at their hands. 

This was not the only one who had met violence at 
the hands of the priesthood, for so ignorant were the 
hereditary rulers of the nation of the law of the spirit, 
that they supposed it to be impossible for any rev- 
elation to be made that did not come through their 
order, and the appearance of a teacher of spiritual 
truths outside of their ranks was the signal for accusa_ 
tion of blasphemy against their god. 

Joshua, having been duly charged with this offense, 
was summarily executed by being stoned to death, but 
his words had made some impression upon some illiter- 
ate and obscure disciples, to whom he afterward ap- 
peared from the world of spirits to confirm them in 
his faith, and for at least three generations he was able 
to make his presence felt at some of their assemblies. 

To these ignorant followers the return of a spirit in 
a visible form, or by other means, was hailed as an 
evidence of Divine power, and in their traditions they 
ascribed to him the honor of having triumphed over 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 79 

death and achieved a victory that demonstrated him to 
be the traditional Messiah. 

In reality Joshua had only done what the sages of 
India had long before declared to be a commonplace 
manifestation of the spiritual world, but to the barbar- 
ous savages of the West it seemed to be much greater, 
and it was not long ere they began to worship him as a 
god, and to formulate a system of religion with some 
of his sayings for doctrines. 

There was another element that had much to do with 
shaping the religious thought of the barbarian West 
about the same time that Joshua was disputing with the 
Jewish hierarchy, viz. : the introduction of Buddhism, 
through the followers of Sakya Muni, who had gone 
from India to the West, as well as to the nations nearer 
home. 

These missionaries of the gospel of peace were 
warmly welcomed by the sages of the schools of learn- 
ing in Greece and Egypt, and numbered many disciples 
among the learned and wise of those nations. In fact, 
so powerful did they become that the worship of the 
native deities of those countries began to decline, so 
that the priesthood, fearing a total overthrow of their 
power, set about devising measures to change the current 
in their own favor, and, as a consequence, the admixture 
of theory and truth that belonged to the systems of the 
followers of Joshua and also of Sakya was adopted and 
became the central religion of that people. 

The Western priesthood did not like to attribute their 
worship to a teacher so far away as India, but they 
took Joshua and changed his name to correspond witi 
a G-reek and Latin term signifying ' ' The One Eterna, 
Being," and thus labeled, the Christian world has been 



so THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

worshiping, for centuries, a fictitious god manufactured 
from the legends and myths of all the religions of pre- 
cedent generations, supplemented by a combination of 
the ideas of two religious teachers, who both were di- 
rectly indebted to the spirit world for what truth they 
knew about the world eternal. 

It is not strange that the Christian world rejects the 
truth of spiritual revelation in this age when it flashes 
so much light upon the obscurity of its origin. It was 
the policy of the early Christian fathers to evade the 
truth or conceal it under a cloud of specious pretenses, 
for many knew their faith was but a fabrication from 
the outset. Nor have they ever been willing to acknowl- 
edge their duplicity in the world of spirit, for so gigantic 
have been the results of their fraud upon the world, 
they stand aghast at the probable consequences to the 
race should their dishonesty and disgrace be known 
upon the earth. 

Hence, they seek in all manner known to deceivers 
to prevent a knowledge of the truth reaching the earth 
from the spiritual world, and, by a wholesale denuncia- 
tion of spiritual manifestations, seek to prevent the world 
of mortals from ascertaining the foundation of the 
dogmas formerly taught as spiritual truth by them upon 
earth. 

In this contest the spirit world of India has a deep 
interest, for from her came the first revelation that 
broke the power of the Christian hierarchy in the world 
of spirit as well as mortal life. It will continue until 
the people of earth know the truth about their gods, 
and whether they belong to the mystic realm of imagina- 
tion or the more palpable sphere of deliberate fabrica- 
tion. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 81 

The Christian world has the latter for the source of 
its faith, while the Oriental nations have drawn largely 
upon the former; but when the truth abolit each is seen 
in its true light, it will be evident why the people of 
India have not substituted Christian superstition for 
Hindoo philosophy, and why the latter is making such 
headway in the lands where the former has long held 
sway. 

It may seem as if there should be some deference 
paid to the men who are trying to propagate the 
Christian ideas in India, but the ideas themselves are 
not essentially new or worthy of special attention by 
its people. 

Ere I close this chapter upon the nature of the 
Christian deity, I ought to refer to one characteristic 
of those followers of him that is specially worthy of 
notice, although it is not specially confined to those of 
his faith alone, viz. : The great credulity of the masses of 
those countries in accepting the divinity of their man-god. 

Their priesthood are equally ignorant of the impossi- 
bility of their god being born out of the usual course 
of nature, but such is their superstitious credulity that 
they teach the avatarship in this particular form with 
an earnestness unknown in India save among the most 
superstitious devotees of the gods. The Christian 
world stakes its hopes of eternal salvation upon this 
priestly fabrication, and teaches it with a zeal that 
surpasses the comprehension of earthly wisdom. 

In reality their god was born the same as other mor- 
tals, and lived and died in the same manner as all mor- 
tals would under the same circumstances; but the tales 
that came from the East, that were but mistaken trans- 
lations of Oriental metaphor, were accepted by these 
7 



82 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

ignorant people as literal truths. Hence their god has 
all the distinguishing traits of Sakya Muni, coupled 
with much of the philosophic wisdom of Egypt and 
Greece in the palmy days of the latter nation, so that 
the Christian world is but an evolution of the Oriental 
in its religious worship, yet not even able to compre- 
hend the subtle thought that the East sought to em- 
body in its mystical language. For spiritual life and 
.spiritual thought must have their own time for a per- 
fect evolution, and the religion of the West has never 
had the power to rise above the savage superstitions 
that clouded the Oriental thought when translated into 
its barbarous language. 

In fact, so low were they in the scale of an intel- 
lectual spirituality that they conceived the idea from 
some savage or ignorant mind that the Supreme Om 
sent his only begotten son into the earthly life that he 
(the Son) might be killed, so that justice should be 
satisfied and their god vindicated from the charge of 
cruelty in the wholesale destruction of the human race. 

This is the basis of the theology of the Christian 
world, and it is only where the wisdom of the Buddha 
refutes it that the Christian faith has any claim to be 
considered a religion of heavenly origin, yet the Bud- 
dhahood is attained but by few among that people. 

Therefore, O sons of India, I come to say to you that 
the Christian's god is of the same nature as your own 
avatars, whom you have worshiped in vain for ages. 
They are not worthy of your adoration, nor should you 
seek unto them as if they held the keys of life eternal 
for you, or any soul. The avatars are not the em- 
bodied gods of other ages, but the more perfectly born 
and spiritually enlightened of your own life, and when 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 83 

India ceases to expect her gods to deliver her, she will 
rise in the power of a new life to break the chains of 
every grade of oppression. 

She has the gods in her own mortal children that can 
be the means of her deliverance, and when her children 
learn that the true gods of a people are from the people, 
they will no longer bow at the shrines of departed 
spirits, but lift the soul to the heights of divine contem- 
plation, and receive the celestial light that comes to the 
soul at peace with itself and the Supreme. 

Even the Christain world can have this light, and it 
is breaking through the dense clouds of ignorance and 
superstition that long have enveloped its people, and 
they are learning something of the true nature of the 
soul and its immortal destiny. 

Despise not the light that comes to India from the 
Western world when' it comes freed from the taint of 
the superstition of creedalism. It is the Buddhahood 
coming to them according to the Vedantic prophecies, 
and the West is to rejoice in its blessings as well as the 
hosts of India. 

They know not its source, nor are they yet able to 
receive it in all its splendor, for their spiritual birth is 
not yet, although they imagine the quickening process 
that reaches so many is the birth unto Nirvana. In 
their spiritual darkness they connect it with the 
Buddhahood and imagine themselves enlightened, but 
they see not, nor can they hardly discern the voice of 
the spirit, so imperfect has been their spiritual evolu- 
tion in the mental darkness of the past ages. 

Therefore, for a while, they must remain in the men- 
tal environment in which they are being spiritually 
gestated, but the time of their birth will come, and then 



84 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

they will wonder at the mistakes they have made in 
their childish efforts to teach the nations of the East 
the nature of the spiritual life. Like children they 
are to be treated by the sons of Brahm, and as children 
outgrow the thoughts and ideas of childhood, so will 
the people of the West learn to regard their present 
crude and ignorant theories of the Divine nature, and 
discard them for the wisdom and benevolence which 
the sages of India taught the philosophers of the 
West centuries before the Christians' God was born, 
and which in reality made the better part of the 
Christian religion a possibility among the savage and 
bloody nations in which it has existed since its formu- 
lation from the systems of previous generations. 



CHAPTEK IX. 

THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 

Within the memory of the past generation there has 
been a great evolution of spiritual thought among the 
Western nations which has had its influence in paving 
the way for the reception of a higher type of religious 
ideas than belonged to their ancient theology. 

This epoch in their religious history began with the 
introduction of more liberal ideas of the nature of their 
Trinity, and was first formulated in the denial of the 
divinity of their embodied god and the substitution of 
him as the greatest religious teacher of his age and 
generation. ^ 

This explanation of the Christian godhead was an 
improvement upon the extremely superstitious teach- 
ings of the ancient fathers of their faith, but it fell 
short of a complete analysis of the subject, for the 
true story of his life was not known, and the composi- 
tion of the ideas upon which the mythical Savior of 
the Christian world was fabricated was a mystery. 

The early Christian fathers or their immediate descend- 
ants were responsible for this, for in the fabrication 

*The great spiritual wave of liberal ideas which swept over 
America, and culminated in the separation of the liberal from the 
orthodox interpreters of the scriptures, was ever a source of per- 
plexity to the Christian sects whe still clung to the barbaric the- 
ology of Calvin or Luther. A similar influx is still pushing its way 
Westward and sweeping away the idea of the sanctity of supersti- 
tious interpretations of any doctrine, and gradually unfolding the 
greater beauties of a natural evolution of all powers. — B. 

(85) 



86 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

of the tales regarding their deity they copied freely 
from the legends current in the Oriental world con- 
cerning the old gods, and save in the substitution of 
the mild and peaceful doctrines of Sakya Muni for the 
licentious intrigues of the Egyptian and Roman deities, 
the Christian system did not vary essentially from the 
religions it superseded. 

But in the propagation of the beneficent ideas of 
Sakya Muni the Western world obtained its first in- 
timation of the true Theosophy or wisdom of the Divine 
Nature. Sakya Muni had instructed his disciples that 
peace, not war, was the true policy to insure earthly 
and spiritual blessedness, and the nations of the West 
were so given to war that the preaching of a gospel of 
peace as a message from the gods was so opposed to the 
savage nature and moral and political measures of that 
people that it was long ere it was welcomed as a true 
system, except by the very learned or the extremely 
poor and ignorant, who were tired of the oppression 
that war engendered. 

Hence, when the disciples of Sakya Muni came from 
the East, bearing the higher light of the spirit world, 
they found some opposition as well as welcome, but 
they had the satisfaction of seeing their ideas adopted 
to some extent and placed among the sacred writings 
of the West, although they were modified somewhat to 
suit the temper of the age and generation to whom 
they came.* 

*The writings of the ancient fathers of the church abound hi 
much that seems fanatical and absurd to us of this age, but they 
have had a great influence, modifying tlie savage disposition of the 
nations to whom they were given. While they reflect the thoughts 
of a priesthood tinged with superstition and ignorance, they probar 
bly were an improvement upon tlie licentious intrigues that pre- 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 87 

Those writings in after ages became the basis of 
the Christian theosophy, which differed from the Indian 
in this, that it admitted of no hope of change after the 
physical death, whereas the ideas of Sakya held that by 
the attainment of Nirvana the soul would not need to 
ever return to the sphere of earth to have another 
embodiment. The Christian system changed this some- 
what, to correspond with the Egyptian theory of a 
physical resurrection and spiritual re-embodiment, 
after which there would be a new heaven and a new 
earth, to be inhabited by thos.e who should be found 
worthy to obtain entrance therein. 

Sakya Muni knew well of the existence of the 
spiritual world, and his life work was to familiarize his 
disciples with the idea of a blessed life in the Nirvanian 
heavens after death; but the crude and ignorant West 
could not rise to a conception of a refined spirituality, 
and changed his Nirvana to a material city built of 
stones and paved with gold, into which was to be 
admitted the favored disciples of the new faith, while 
the myriad hosts who had preceded them were either 
to remain in outer darkness or be provided for in some 
way unknown to the souls of earth.* 

vailed in the pagan temples, and in a modified degree changed the 
bloody sacrifices of beasts and fowls for the more humane precepts 
of the schools of philosophic thought. — B. 

*Here is a perfectly rational explanation of the effect of the 
Oriental philosophy upon the barbaric mentality of the West, and 
why the translation of the ideas from the Orient to the West had 
to have a mutilation to be received, Roman civilization was brutal 
and bloody in its materiality. The influx of ideas of a spiritual 
character was met by this material environment of the savagery of 
the West. It had to take a material expression — hence the Christian 
paradise, with its city of stone and its streets of gold, the height of 
barbaric conception of power and beauty. — B. 



SS THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

The Christian world speedily closed the doors of 
further information upon the subject by forbidding in- 
tercourse with the spiritual spheres as both dangerous 
and impossible, and sank into a night of spiritual gloom 
that has not yet been dispelled with all their boasted 
light of revelation from the source of Eternal Wisdom. 

In doing this, they laid the foundations for that 
spiritual subservience to a priesthood that has ever 
striven to keep them ignorant of the truth and subordi- 
nate to the deductions of a type of mentality that knows 
nothing of developed spiritual powers; and that has 
never been able to rise above traditional interpretations 
of the ideas which were living truths to their original 
exponents. 

The Western world has struggled for centuries to 
attain spiritual knowledge and power by ignoring the 
only natural method whereby such knowledge and power 
can be attained. Its priesthood, ignorant, and con- 
scious of their lack of power, are cowardly opponents 
of the only class that has ventured to explore the 
forbidden realm, and who find that Christian dogma 
concerning it is almost totally false. 

Hence, in the Christian world, spiritual science is 
viewed askance, and Christian ignorance is taught as 
divine wisdom. Many of Christian people are either 
superstitious devotees of an unknown God or skeptical 
disbelievers of the whole subject. They erect their 
temples and maintain a host of teachers, but the taught 
are left in spiritual darkness as to any proof of a spirit- 
ual life, and if they obtain it they do so by seeking light 
outside the channels which their religious teachers 
have instituted for the spiritual enlightenment of the 
race. 



THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 89 

This being the situation of the Christian world, it 
became a necessity that there should be a revelation of 
a different character from the spiritual world, or the 
faint remnants of spirituality might be obscured in the 
dense darkness that envelops that people who fail to 
grasp the full signification of the subject. India had 
her spiritual evolution centuries before the Western 
nations knew of a spiritual idea above the plane of 
savages or barbarians. Her highest spiritual doctrines 
culminated in the ideas taught by such enlightened 
minds as Capilya and Sakya Muni. The spiritual life 
of the nation rose to the apprehension of a Divine Power 
that was impersonal and universal in its beneficence. 

This interpretation of the Supreme was far in advance 
of the savage or barbarous theology of the sacrificial 
type, and burst upon the mortal comprehension with the 
vividness of a divine revelation. It was hardly worthy 
of this consideration, but to the minds benighted by 
ignorance or degraded by crime it was the signal of a 
new interpretation of Divinity itself. 

This wisdom was called the Divine life in the Indian 
phraseology, or the Buddhahood. In the West, it was 
termed Theosophia or the wisdom of the gods. Only 
those anointed with it could claim spiritual illumination, 
and those who could attain it were to be forever exempt 
from the further connection with the mental atmos- 
phere of earthly thoughts or earthly influence. To the 
seeker after spiritual attainments, it was represented 
as the goal of human effort, and to this day it is taught 
in more or less crude forms throughout the Christian 
and Heathen worlds.* 

* There are scores of people to whom this spiritual enlightenment 
comes who never express outwardly the great changes it makes in 



90 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

Where priestly dogma has not deliberately substi- 
tituted for it the ceremonial form or the more vivid 
symbolism, it touches all minds upon the same plane of 
development with similiarity of thought or likeness of 
spiritual experience. Neither Christian nor Heathen 
has a monopoly of it, however, and. the wisdom of the 
divine order cheers all hearts to whom it comes with 
the blessedness of a conscious approval by the Supreme 
Author of all life. The Christian world imagines it 
has a moiiopoly of this conscious spirituality, but its 
power in reality is so low and undeveloped that it may 
be said of it, that except among the higher castes or 
classes the existence of the spiritual nature is unknown. 
They were slow to adopt the idea of a conscious spiri- 
tual presence, and have hardly yet been able to recog- 
nize the universality of spirit, or its development among 
all nations upon parallel lines.* 

Hence their spiritual wisdom is hardly worthy of the 
name Theosophia and their definitions of the Divine 
nature partake too much of the crudest speculation as 

their mental atmosphere, but whose faces show the presence'of an 
inner light that illuminates the pathway they tread, however rugged 
it may be. They are not depeudeut upon human definitions of its 
nature, nor are they disturbed by the denial of those less enlight- 
ened as to its existence. Such souls have entered the path, and 
will reach Nirvana ere they pass beyond the bounds of mortal life. 
* The belief among Christian theologians as to the darkness of 
Heathen peoples has been a great stimulus to missionary ettort to 
enlighten them, but the fact that spiritual light touches all people 
who have a certain degree of mental unfoldment is not generally 
known by them. As they had their spiritual unfoldment under 
the Christian definition of the term, they supposed that it was only 
under that system spiritual light came to earth, and so have ex- 
pended much unnecessary zeal in behalf of the Heathen world. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 91 

to origin or purpose in the work of cosmic creation. 
To them only, the Supreme Creator has made provision 
for the welfare of the few, while the great masses perish 
or are hopelessly condemned to eternal suffering. Their 
G-od has left no alternative to be considered, and the 
culmination of Christian theology is the deduction that 
the Divine wisdom utterly Jailed in its efforts to re- 
deem or perfect its work in the creation of immortal 
beings. 

This is far from the teachings of the true Theosophia 
(Theosophy). That declares that the Divine mind is 
both omnipotent and omniscient. It also affirms that 
its beneficence is equal to all the demands upon it for 
every type or form of being that exists. It says there 
can be no ultimate failure in the designs of planetary 
or any other life, and while it is not arbitrary, it affirms 
that all this is to be wrought by the power of the Al- 
mighty in and through the processes of spiritual law. 

It penetrates the spheres of spirit, and perceives how 
the same essential principles prevail there as in the first 
sphere of evolutionary form, and declares that life be- 
ing universal, progress must be eternal. It touches the 
secret springs of spiritual action, and traces the evolu- 
tion of spirituality from its incipient stages until it ends 
in a perfect comprehension of the spiritual nature. 

This is the declaration of Theosophy, the fruit of 
Indian metaphysical discovery, viz. : That all life is of 
G-od, and all life is in G-od ( in the idiom best expressed 
in the tongues of the Western world), and that no life 
can perish without G-od himself be destroyed. 

The theologians of the West are unable to grasp this 
thought in its entirety and call it Pantheism, but in 
their ignorance of spirituality as it is they have never 



92 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

fathomed in any degree the tremendous significence of 
their own basis of spiritual thought as personified in 
their Trinity. Their Holy Spirit is the nearest trans- 
lation they could give to the Sanscrit Om, but with the 
perversity of ignorance they have placed it last in the 
order although it should have been first, and the con- 
trolling power of their Father, Son and Devil. 

In their reversal they lost the true significance of each 
in the symbols from which they copied them, and have 
never known the meaning of the terms embodied in 
their barbarian theories of deity. They lost the Divine 
wisdom and have never regained, it, for they were too 
proud to acknowledge their ignorance and too ignorant 
to seek for knowlege in the only land and nation that 
held the true key to the ancient symbolism. Hence 
they adopted a spurious god, a defective creed and a 
ridiculous system of theology, to cope with the over- 
whelming power of the true Theosophy. 



CHAPTEK X. 

THE SYMBOLISM OF THE ANCIENT WORSHIP. 

When the missionaries of the Western nations came 
to India they were horrified at the respect paid to the 
images in the temples by which the ancient teachers 
sought to convey to the lower castes ideas of the prin- 
ciples that exist in spirit and mortal life. These ima- 
ges they pronounced idols worthy of destruction, for to 
them they conveyed a meaning entirly different from 
that intended by the ancient teachers. The source of 
life could only be symbolized by the organs of genera- 
tion, which the Christian world has taught as obscene 
by nature, and the linga and yoni are to their minds the 
symbols of lust and depravity. This was not so in- 
tended by the teachers of the ancient faith, and it is 
curiously significant that the ball and cross with which 
the priests of Christian temples adorn their houses of 
worship are but modifications of the ancient symbolism 
whereby India sought to express the source of life to 
mortal comprehension. The Christian world put the 
linga and yoni at the top of their temples to this day, 
without knowing that in so doing they have only veiled 
the phallus which they denounce as tending to the 
deification of lust and debauchery.* 

*Tliis Oriental way for accounting for the Christian symbolism 
has been disputed by mauy devotees of the entire originality of 
Christian system. But the shrewd critics of the East have long 
been acquainted with the device of conveying ideas by symbols, and 
under any disguise they seem to see the similarity of design to 

(93) 



94 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

Of the other symbols that stand in the temples 
which represent the various gods of India, I can only- 
say that they all exemplify the specific ideas which 
belong to some special system that the tolerant spirit 
of Hindooism has allowed to spread, or from the wor- 
ship of decarnated spirits who love to be worshiped on 
earth by the ignorant and superstitious people there. 
Accordingly, they have impressed their thoughts upon 
the sensitive minds of the ignorant, and through the 
power of impression have weighed down the minds of 
many millions with fear and reverence of spiritual ven- 
geance should their vengeance be neglected; but like 
their conterparts in the Western nations, they have no 
real power over those who fear them not. The goddess 
Doorgha or the goddess Kali* are as powerless in 
reality to help or harm the soul of the intelligent as 
the devil of the Christian world, which exists only in 
the imagination with which superstition has peopled 
the spiritual life. 

The charge is boldly made, that India has lost its 
spiritual light t hrough subservience^to the deities whose 
symbols express all the phases of human passion and 
animality. This is only true in a limited degree, for 
India went down in the grade of spiritual enlightenment 
when she mistook the symbolism for the ideas it was 
intended to convey, and her degradation came when she 

their own system. From the fact that Christianity is a compouud 
of various other systems, the symboUsm reflects a varied constitu- 
ency and the Hindoo may not be far wrong in his deductions. — B. 
*Doorgha and KaU were two ancient deified personifications of 
the feminine powers in nature. Their worship reflects the mental 
savagery that came from the primitive races of ancient India. 
They do not belong to the Aryan races, although tolerated by the 
Brahmin priesthood, along with the other gods. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 95 

forsook that high mental interpretation of the symbols 
for the superstitious reverence of the images as the 
resident forms of the spiritual power. "^ 

Many of the Christian temples have the images of 
the reputed founder of their faith, and their worshipers 
bow in adoration before them, but they resent the imputa- 
tion that they worship the image, and in reality they 
only use it to call more vividly to the mind the personal 
G-od which they adore; so that, if a charge of idolatry 
is preferred by these Western barbarians against the 
worship of the Oriental nations, it is of a similar 
character to the symbolism by which they express their 
divinities to the eye of the ignorant devotees. 

These people of the West are grossly ignorant of the 
nature or use of symbols. Many of them have an hered- 
itary opposition to their use, and suppose that they 
were forbidden by their G-od in the ancient code, which 
they still reverence. But they do not know that the 
code of laws which they ascribe to Moses was copied 
from the ancient laws of Zoroaster, and Menu of India, 
and was afterwards made the basis of the monotheistic 
worship of the West. Their later priesthood took 
these writings as a basis of doctrine, and incorporated 
them with the symbolism that prevailed among the 
Greeks, and from them compiled the code of ancient 

* This superstitious regard for the emblems is not confined to 
Heathen peoples. In the Catholic communion, the elevation of the 
host, and the fancied translation of the bread and wine into the 
veritable body and blood of a God, is as gross a superstition as ever 
was held among the most idolatrous heathen nation in existence. 
But the Christian priesthood of that order are as literal interpre- 
ters of the dogma as the most devout Hindoo that ever bowed at 
the shrine of Kali or dipped himr,elf in Ganges' sacred waters to 
insure eternal blessedness. — B. 



96 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

and modern dogmas that is now regarded as a sacred 
revelation, but they have not changed the symbols in 
essential particulars. Even their embodied form of a 
God exhibits the features of SakyaMuni, and their bloody 
crosses reflect the savagery of their primitive worship 
of blood and human sacrifice. 

Their saints are the lesser deities, which correspond 
to the spirits worshiped in India as subordinate gods, 
and they have divided the heavens of the West by lines 
that correspond with the jurisdiction of the creeds and 
sects, which reflect the varied thoughts of their ignorant 
teachers. 

For these apostles of the Christian faith themselves 
are not aware of the true nature of spiritual powers, 
yet they imagine themselves competent to enlighten the 
world by the artificial torches which they construct out 
of the material given from the Oriental nations. Where 
they have retained their faith in the Supreme Om they 
have made some progress, but where they have modified 
or mixed it with the imagery of the symbols, they have 
retrograded or been seriously retarded in their develop- 
ment of the spiritual nature. 

Yet with all their pretensions to knowledge of spir- 
itual life from their so-called divine revelations, the 
existence of a spiritual life is taught by them to be 
incapable of proof, and their entrance upon it after 
death to be entirely problematical. * 

*The reluctance with which the Christian church receives testi- 
mony of a character to settle the vexed question of the immortal 
nature of the soul is observed in its treatment of all who have 
become recipients of spiritual gifts. The possession of clairvoyance 
or the claim to the knowledge of spiritual powers is evidence 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 97 

Such instructors are incapable of interpreting the 
symbolism of India, and their ideas relative to it are on 
a par with their ignorance of the symbolism of their 
own faith. 

There is one curious result of this ignorance witnessed 
in the spiritual world which accounts for much that 
perplexes the students of spiritual phenomena in the 
material life. The Christian priesthood, ( chiefly of the 
Catholic faith, as well as some Prostestant sects,) after 
their transition to the life of spirit cling to the errors 
of their earthly ideas, and strive to realize their hopes 
of an exclusive heaven. They find themselves unable 
to control any minds save those equally ignorant or of 
an inferior intelligence, and as they cannot control the 
wise in spirit life they strive to close the doors of any 
intelligence regarding the life of spirit from reaching 
the mind of mortals. By so doing, they can populate 
their sphere of the spirit world with a class of spirits 
that still reoi;ards them as oracles of wisdom, and for a 
season hold them in allegiance. 

But their devotees soon tire of' this repressive and 
restricted sphere of life, and, when intelligent enough 
to break away, soon leave them for a more intelligent 
and less deceptive society. For deception is the only 
power the priesthood of any people can exercise to retain 
their allegiance. The very office as exercised upon 
earth is an imposition upon the intelligence of man, 
and when the mind outgrows it, the god recedes and 
the priest departs. 

enough to exclude the claimant from Christian fellowship and 
insure his condemnation from the authorized representatives of its 
creedal system. — B. 

8 



98 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

It would have left India long ago had the people 
risen in their intellectual power and had their spiritual 
gods been of a high order; but they are not. and despite 
the efforts of the older teachers to break the power of 
superstition, the despotism of the hierarchy in spirit is 
still felt upon earth, holding the people in mental bond- 
age and preventing the spread of a knowledge of truth 
and wisdom of a higher spiritual order. 



CHAPTEK XI. 

THE ERROR OF THE DOCTRINE OF REIXCARXATION 
AS TAUGHT BY THE THEOSOPHISTS OF EARTH. 

I have alluded ill another place to what were the 
original ideas which became the basis of the present 
doctrine of the reincarnation of the spirit as now 
taught upon earth, and think it well to write further 
about it, as the mischief wrought by it in India has 
been almost beyond compute. 

I have said that it only meant, in the most ancient ages, 
the principles by which the forming spiritual powers 
of earth should be perpetually reproduced in all ages, 
after the planet had once become able to evolve them, 
and I think it wise to state again in positive terms the 
reasons why the idea of re-embodiment of the indi- 
vidual in earthly relations must be beyond the province 
of natural law. 

Notwithstanding one of the ablest writers* upon the 
Oriental system of Buddhism has sought to connect it 
with the principles of evolution, an understanding of 
the office of planetary life will soon expose the sophis- 
tical ideas that are inwoven with the truth, and leave 
the mind free to proceed upon its evolutionary path- 
way without the fear of having to retrace its steps to 
tread the earthly pilgrimage again. 

The simple truth about planetary life in its first 
stages is, that the entity which survives death is really 
a product of the planetary relations of the elements 

*A. P. Siunett. 

•(99) 



100 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

and gets its inception there. If it be forcibly detached, 
it can be magnetically attached to kindred spiritual 
entities in the form, and obtain life experience through 
that relation, but it has no power to go back to the 
primitive status or to become re-embodied at the ex- 
pense of the embryotic life, and nature most emphati- 
cally refuses to permit it. 

The great trouble with our modern Indian teachers is, 
that they fail to conceive of the eternity of matter* as 
well as spirit, and also fail to connect the two as correla- 
tives in the universal cosmos. By so doing, they miss 
the knowledge of the inception of the spirit, and vaguely 
suppose it gets its original impetus from the universal 
impersonal spirit which seeks to express itself through 
matter to obtain knowledge that it could not gain else- 
where. 

These metaphysical teachers of reincarnation of the 
individual spirit have had to meet many objections 
and much speculative questioning, but their chief re- 
liance has been and still is that Karma is the cause of 
reincarnation, and when a good Karma is obtained they 
will not need to repeat the experiences of earth further. 

Now it is well to go a little further into the consid- 
eration of the idea of Karma, and see if it presents any 
good basis for the theory of rebirth into conditions 

* Perhaps it would be well to state, that the a priori method of 
reasoning common iu the Oriental world is the cause of their at- 
tributing everything in nature to the direct control of a spirit. 
Matter in the fourth dimensional capacity has a correlative exprt s- 
sion but not a clear definition iu the language, and the confusion 
of thought engendered is quite noticeable when one tries to follow 
the ideas of the Indian philosophy in its present form. Some 
theosophists claim much more than they can prove at present, but 
the mark of the priest is on them in some form. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. IQl 

that necessarily must be extremely likely to produce 
a bad Karma. * If the experience of earthly life has not 
been able in its first influence upon the embryotic spirit to 
give it a good Karma, will the continuation of rebirths 
into the same or similar conditions be likely to improve 
the spirit as surely as to detach its thoughts and de- 
sires from that state as much as possible? 

Now the law of spiritual unfoldment is this, that the 
better the conditions the wiser and purer the life; and 
while it may be necessary for the spiritual entity to lay 
its foundation in planetary life, the sooner it can escape 
from bad conditions there the more likely it will be to 
have a beautiful development. It may have to stay in 
the mortal environment for a season to perfect the form 
powers, but when that is once accomplished no neces- 
sity exists for further imprisonment upon earth, for all 
that earth can teach is what pertains to the physical 
senses rather than to the spiritual life, and to condemn 
a spirit to return to it after once having had its nature 
developed in that direction would be to degrade rather 
than exalt the soul, nor could anything be gained by it. f 

* The vagaries that follow the adoption of this idea as truth are 
strikingly seen in the idea that the final redemption from a bad 
Karma is to be obtained by a transition from earth in infancy. Of 
course this is only another of the fallacious ideas that error breeds 
when it obtains the ascendancy in the miud, for while nature enters 
a most marked protest against early death, Karma demands it. 
India has suffered terribly by the perversion of this as well as other 
false ideas, and infanticide has had to be suppressed by the strong 
hand of the civil government. — B. 

f Spirits of the scientific order never indorse the advisability of 
early death, and aver that until the embryotic spirit has obtained 
the necessary development of earth life, it must remain in the 
magnetic environment of earth. This gives it all the experience 
needed, and effectually disposes of the theories of a spiritual rebirth 



102 THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 

Nature has provided the most ample means for the 
spiritual influx of thoughts to earth, and any spirit can 
avail itself of them, but to cling to the ideas of sense 
which pertain to earthly life is to invite the animal 
rather than the spiritual to obtain ascendency. 

The original Karma idea was, that the soul would 
have to expiate in its experiences the effect of all condi- 
tions through which it would have to pass from the 
realm of unconscious being to the perfect development 
of all its powers. It was perceived by the wiser teachers 
of India that the spiritual influx from the lower spheres 
of spirit betokened a bad Karma, and that it was not 
possible for the spirituality of a low order to perfect 
itself except through a series of mental experiences or 
evolutions from one plane of thought to another of 
higher degree, and in the metaphorical expressions of 
the language the idea of a rebirth was used to designate 
this process. At first it was taught to the primitive 
disciples as a spiritual experience and was never under- 
stood in any other sense until a debased priesthood 
arose and gave the literal interpretation which has 
been taught in India for many generations.^ 

By the law of spiritual evolution, the spirit once hav- 
ing had its formative stages in earthly or planetary 

into antenatal life. It is nature asserting her rights, which no 
power less than hers can deprive one of, but she can do it without 
disturbing the general equilibrium of either world. — B. 

*The hand of the priest is ever potent to improte the teachings 
of the philosopher. Here a perfectly natural process of soul un- 
foldment upon a spiritual plane is perverted and dragged into the 
mire of sensual life to sustain the prerogatives of a priesthood. It 
is a wonder that the crafty swindlers did not otfer a free passage 
into Brahm by the payment of a fee, but that was reserved to the 
priesthood of the Christian world. — B. 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 103 

life has no more necessity for returning to that condi- 
tiorr than the developed bird has to reenter the shell of 
the embryotic period, for the earth experiences at best 
are but formative, and, as far as being of any great value 
except in the necessities of the embryotic stages of life, 
may be said to be detrimental rather than to be desired. 

Planets are a necessity in the supreme economy to 
organize the elements into conscious entities known as 
spirits, but beyond that function they have no essential 
purpose of a spiritual character. They have ever been 
the nurseries of the embryotic forms of spirits, and fill 
a great office in this respect, but they are far from be- 
ing a necessary factor in the higher gradations of spir- 
itual power; and when it has been necessary to raise the 
grade of the spiritual environment of their peoples, it 
has had to be done by influx that excites the ho^Des of 
the soul to escape from the trammels of form life, rather 
than by teaching that a necessity exists to return and 
repeatedly pass through its experiences. 

There is an influx of thought upon this subject pour- 
ing in upon the planet earth to-day, that has its origin 
in the mental bias of Hindoo thought of the present 
age. and that bodes much trouble if it be not checked. 
India has steadily sunk in the grade of her spiritual pow- 
ers because of it, for in place of the pure doctrines of 
the ancient Yedantic system the priestly perversion is 
taking its place as the original ideality. In Europe 
and America, the teachers of the wisdom divine are con- 
founding the moral sentiments that are the basis of 
spiritual unfoldment with the superstitions engendered 
by the priesthood, and ere the people of those coun- 
tries are aware they will be invaded by the hosts of the 
lower Asian heavens, who still are seeking re-embodi- 



lOi THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

ment, and a carnival of licentiousness may be inaugu- 
rated that will sink those countries as low in the scale 
as India has ever been. 

For the spiritual thought of a people is the standard 
of its grade in knowledge, and to a soul imbued with 
the idea of reincarnation to escape the consequences of 
a bad Karma all avenues are legitimate, and a parentage 
of adultery is as welcome as the doorway of wedlock.^ 

It is for this reason I would send the warnino- note 
to the world of the West, that while they admit the 
ideas of India as far as they open the gates of knowledge 
of the spiritual world, to discriminate between the pure 
doctrines of the Vedas and the fanciful theories of the 
ignorant and crafty pretenders who close the doors in 
all lands to the influx of intelligent spiritual ideas. 

The Western world has had a deluo-e of Oriental 
creedalism to counterbalance its own crude conceptions 
of the Divine nature, but neither formula has proven 
sufficient to protect its believers from flagrant imposi- 
tion in the name of their gods. The Oriental influx is 
seized upon by the souls in darkness or despair, and 
labeled by various names as well as taught by numerous 
schools, each of whom only appreciates a portion of the 
truth. 

Some of them deny the individual existence of any 

*The Theosophical schools with their secret initiation ceremo- 
nies and mjsterious miitteriugs of Karraic wrath may not be aware 
that the Western nations have a spiritual guardianship that sees 
tlirough their flimsy pretexts; but a power exists that can tell all 
the secrets which they so carefully veil, and which they hesitate 
not to villify if it suits their purposes. To flood the West with 
the reincarnation theories is to invite an irruption of the vilest 
grades in spirit life, and no wonder that the higher spheres of 
spirit are averse to it. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 105 

thing but the impersonal Supreme, and imagine they 
will be absorbed in the Divine ocean of spirit upon their 
transition to the world of soul life, losing consciousness 
and individuality. Others are sure that the spiritual 
world can have no direct influx into the sphere of con- 
scious life upon earth, and teach that such an idea is 
delusion or dangerous. Others, again, are so anxious 
to become united to the godhead that they forget the 
great law of spiritual unfoldment, and seek to hurry 
matters, generally ending in disappointment, or shame 
and disgrace. 

Fanaticism is slowly rearing its hideous face in the 
spiritual movement, and the most absurd dogmas re- 
garding the power of the spirit to control the material 
forces are freely advocated, not because the disciples 
are not honest, but because they know not the nature of 
the laws governing either. The most irrational ideas 
of the control of spiritual powers by the will of ignorant 
embodied souls are advanced, and the experiments made 
by the most intelligent minds in spirit to demonstrate 
principles are supposed to be in the regiilar order of 
evidence to support the theories of extravagant vis- 
ionaries. 

Perhaps no more difficult lesson has ever been learned 
upon earth, than the hopelessness of its ignorance of 
what really pertains to its spiritual nature and the 
true position it holds in the universal life.* 

* The amount of intelligeut ignoraDce current upon earth is one 
of the problems that eternity alone can solve. There are societies 
and systems innumerable for the study of the occult forces, but 
hardly any two of them can agree touching the nature of the spirit 
or the true methods of its enfoldment. Even the wisest minds 
fail here to discriminate between the natural laws and the artificial 
theories that pertairn to it. — B. 



106 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

It would, indeed, be a sorrowful fate for humanity if 
it was bound by the decrees of the spiritual magnates 
of earth. It would have a hopeless destiny were it 
compelled to follow the pathway that Hindoo or Chris- 
tian theology had marked out for it in the Divine 
economy. But fortunately it is not bound to obey 
either any further than they follow the natural law of 
spiritual evolution. 

That law does not call for the return to the environ- 
ment of earth after its escape from the atmosphere of 
earthly thoughts, nor does it ever need to express itself 
again in the realm of earthly embodiment. Its path- 
way to Nirvana is away from earth, and happy the 
soul who is freed from the idea of ever having to tread 
the path through mortal life again. ^ 

Gautama taught truly in this, and could India 
emancipate herself from the tyranny of the idea of re- 
incarnation, she would rise in the scale of spiritual en- 
lightenment far higher than she rose in the age of the 
Vedas or when Capilya or Gautama led her hosts 
toward the heavenly paradise. She must do this or 
she must remain the prey to vile superstitions, and her 
moral nature be degraded by the mental influx of 
myriad hosts who strive in vain to realize the truth of 
the dogma. 

The Western nations have been the prey of a sense- 
less belief in a return to the physical body, but not 

* Compare the moral power of this thought with the idea that 
life is a ceaseless round of incarnatious upon the various planets, 
and weigh well the difference. One exalts the spiritual conscious- 
ness to the highest heavens, while the other condemns the victim 
to perpetual despair. For the thought of return in spirit cannot 
be forgotten, and it is only when the soul experiences the emanci- 
pation from it that it can soar onward into the realms of Nirvana. — B. 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 107 

through the process taught so many years in India, 
and although the numerous hosts of her ignorant 
children hover over the earth awaiting; the resurrec- 
tion morn, yet they can do but little harm compared 
with the souls whose thought is felt upon the earth as 
they strive to impress the mortals there to furnish 
avenues for the spirit to enter earth again to expiate a 
bad Karma. The societies forming in the West for the 
study of Hindoo thought should be aware that the pro- 
jection of thought upon earth by a concentrated effort 
of the will must have its effect there, and if that 
thought be upon a plane of error, it may be long ere its 
effect will be removed. Therefore I speak thus posi- 
tively about the subject of the reincarnation of the 
spirit. 

A Hindoo of the ages so long ago that my name is 
forgotten, but one who has been worshiped as an in- 
carnation of Brahm. I claim the right to speak to 
India and to the world, warning them not to trust in 
the w^isdom of man, whose interpretation of the laws of 
spirit must be vain, until he has arrived to that degree 
of knowledge whereby he knows the nature and office 
of spirit and form in the spheres of universal being. 



CHAPTER XII. 

THE ORIGIN OF THE SPIRITUAL ENTITY. 

The world of mortal life has ever been the subject of 
speculative inquiry by the thinkers of all ages, and from 
the earliest periods of conscious mentality the origin 
of the spirit has occupied the attention of the most 
learned in earthly knovi^ledge. 

India was the first nation to develop a school of 
metaphysical study, • and she was the most profound 
student of the varied powers that enter into the struc- 
ture of sentient life. She saw that life belono^ed«to a 
regular order of physical relations, and she also saw 
that connected with it was a realm of life beyond the 
physical which had much to do with determining the 
status of thought prevalent in that relation, and upon 
that premise she built her great doctrine of the im- 
mortal nature of the spirit. 

Clustered around this central point of fact has been 
gathered the web and woof of fictitious drapery that 
conceals the truth from the beholder and presents a 
spectacle of illusive theories which have been accepted 
by the students of the modern age as the genuine 
Indian philosophy. According to this latter school 
of pundits, the ancient sages formulated a system 
whereby the worlds, visible and invisible, could ever 
act and react upon each other with definite and tangi- 
ble effects, that were subject to human comprehension 
and subordinate to human manipulation. Briefly 
stated this system is, that all individual souls owe their 

(lOS) 



THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 109 

origin to the differentiation of One Supreme Soul who 
presides over and permeates the universe. All these 
subordinate parts of the Supreme Spirit are themselves 
but as individual drops in the great Ocean of Spirit 
from which they came, and to which they return in the 
cyclic periods of eternity, losing and regaining con- 
sciousness as they pass through the conditions of plane- 
tary unfoldment, but liable to extinction in the universal 
abysm of absorption by the Supreme if the life stages 
fail to produce a perfect Karma.* 

Under this system, the spiritual entity only enters 
planetary life to acquire experience, and passes from 
one planet to another in the grand cyclic waves of life 
energy, as it flows from one planetary system to another. 
By this theory, the spirit entity has its organic func- 
tional powers previous to its entrance upon planetary 
life, and in that stage is termed an elemental. 

Now, if this idea of the spiritual nature or origin of 
the individual is true, it places the office of planetary 
existence, as a nursery of conscious intelligence, entirely 
out of the question, and calls for more light than the 
teachers of the doctrine have yet thrown upon it; for 
the birth and development of intelligent mentality fol- 
lows after the gestation and birth of the form, and 
as the intelligent spirit becomes the fruitage of de- 
veloped planetary conditions, one naturally considers 

* The reader of occult literature is ofteu puzzled to see how the 
differentiation of the spirit is accounted for upon the theory of a 
segregation of the Infinite spirit. The evolutionary theory, upon 
the other hand, gives a rational hypothesis of the organization of 
non-conscious forces into sentient relations through planetary 
foi-mulation. Probably the true nature of the Supreme mentality 
of the Infinite has not been accurately defined by even the wisest 
metaphysicians in either realm yet. — B. 



110 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

whether it is not contemporary with, or an evolution of, 
planetary life itself. 

If it be so, then there is another reason than the 
Oriental theory for planetary existence, for without 
planets the great universal ocean of spirit cannot be 
expressed in individual form or concentrated in personal 
reflection of the primate principles of spirit. To do 
this, there has to be the segregation of the individual 
drops; but if the elemental theory is correct, the indi- 
vidual soul needs no planetary existence to express 
itself, and would have little to gain by it. 

But Nature, that never labors in vain, does not up- 
hold the elemental theory in her processes of planetary 
life. In her alembic she distills the essences of the 
elements, and draws forth new combinations in every 
age and stage of planetary being. She wastes noth- 
ino", and if the evolutions of life and form are more 
imperfect in certain stages of the planet than in others, 
she does not cruelly annihilate the crude and unde- 
veloped, but provides better conditions, and from the 
same elementary princij^les produces better forms and 
higher grades of life, until, from age to age, the life 
forces stored in the planet have crowned her efforts 
with godlike creations upon the plane of mortal exist- 
ence, meanwhile withdrawing the crude forms as the 
more perfect absorb the energy that formerly was util- 
ized by the primitive life entities. 

For there is a strict relation between the internal 
forces that compose the spiritual basis of life upon the 
planet, and the form through which the life is expressed. 
The spirit of a snake or a higher reptile cannot rise 
much hiffher in the form of the snake than the condi- 
tions in which it had its primitive evolution. The 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. HI 

# 
other orders of animal life follow this same law, and the 

human race has no exemption, for its spiritual ideals 

are high or low according to its grade of development 

in the corresponding conditions of the planet at the 

time its ancestral types were perfected. * 

Man alone has the world of planetary life to subdue 
to his will, but even he finds that his evolution follows 
along the same pathway that the other kingdoms of the 
planet have to pursue, viz. : The steps of a series of un- 
folding powers that culminate in the evolution of an 
intellectual spiritual being. The reptilian orders do 
not rise to this grade in planetary conditions, nor do 
the lower mammalian, but the higher orders reflect 
modified intellectual powers, while all must possess 
more or less the traits of individuality in whatever 
phase of planetary unfoldment they pass into the realm 
of spirit. 

This is the reason why the Hindoo of the past ages 
declared life of the animal world to be sacred, and is 
also the source of the idea of repeated incarnations to 
raise the spirit to the grade of the godlike qualities of 
perfected mentality. 

For the sages of India saw that in spirit the forms of 
the decarnated life of the planet all bore the impress of 
the more or less perfected powers of the developing life 

* This may be denied by the advocates of spiritualization through 
religious influx, and many systems of faith have been based upon 
the possibility of effecting the civilization of the savage tribes by 
changing their religious ideas. While there undoubtedly is a cor- 
responding influx from the world of spirit which aids the mission- 
ary in his labors, there is little question that the elimination of the 
savage or barbarous traits is a work of progressive evolution, re- 
quiring generations of culture to make any pei-manent impres- 
sion. — B. 



112 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

upon the planet, and as thei'e was the natural magnetic 
interchange of mentality between the corresponding 
spheres in spirit and mortal life, it became easy to teach 
the idea of association in the spheres, and also its per- 
version to the theories of transmigration and reincar- 
nation by the speculative philosophers and priesthood, 
that seized upon the ideas as a leverage to control the 
multitude through fear of the spiritual consequences if 
they were not duly reverenced.* 

If the ideas that have been taught so many centuries 
in India as to the nature of the soul and the origin of 
life are deflections from the great parent idea, what has 
the world of the intellectually developed spiritual intel- 
ligence to offer to the world of mortal consciousness 
upon the subject? 

Briefly this : The origin of conscious spirit in form be- 
gins in the planetary stages of form development. The 
elements there come into the correlative conditions, 
whereby the resultant combinations upon certain planes 
act in conscious relations. Those planetary conditions 
are as essential to this result of the interaction of the 
elements in form, as the lower grades of form result 
from the lower rates of the elements in crystallization of 
the rocks or cell life organisms. The spiritual entity 
forms from the elements seeking a higher equilibrium 
than the crystalline and lower organic forms; and 
through the steady increase of the combinatory powers 
of the same elements that make a planet, they make a 

*The regard for animal life that eveu to this day has such a 
hokl in India is but another form of the superstitous deflections 
from the primitive faith which causes a devout Catholic Christian 
to worship a relic of a saint, or regard a piece of wood as a sacred 
object. It is doubtful, however, if the superstition of the Hindoo 
is not at least as sacred as the mummery of his Christian critic. — B. 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 113 

planetary form that contains within itself the pulsating 
forces that are able through form to express the intelli- 
gent relations which belong to the sphere of the invis- 
ible state, yet are not primarily individualized there.* 

Thus through the planet, as a great reservoir battery 
of forces, the spiritual entity gets its inceptive life ex- 
pression, and, laying its foundation in form, goes forward 
ever after, holding the forces in form that previously 
were acting mechanically or subordinate to the great 
universal realm of unconscious material, and without 
other control than general principles, f 

The reader can see how easily the primitive idea of 
evolution of spirit individuality from the universal 
realm of spirit was modified to seem to give color to 
the present system of Buddhistic and Brahmanistic 
theories of the origin of the soul. It was as easy for 
the unscrupulous priestly orders of India to formulate 
their creeds and philosophies upon this basis, as it was 
for the Christian world to crystallize the ignorant 

* This statement as to the origin of the spirit entity is clear and 
explicit enough to satisfy any one as to what is meant. If the su- 
preme mind is impersonal the subordinate ones are not, and their 
organization from the elements through planets seems to account 
for the existence of the latter. It puts an effectual damper upon 
the theory of pre-existent consciousness in form, and agrees quite 
well with natural law as expressed in planetary life. — B. 

f The necessity of planetary conditions for the evolution of spirit 
entities may be seen in the regular law of planetary unfoldment. 
Even the first evolution of form from the elements, as seen in the 
crystal, bears witness to the basic principles of all entities, for the 
most minute form of crystallization only becomes capable of form 
by the principles of atomic balance, whereby primordial substance 
changes from force relations to form manifestations. When the 
balance is high enough we have the life cell in organic forms, and 
by a still higher balance we have the spirit entity, which reflects 



11-t THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

speculations of an ignorant age and give them to the 
world as revealed truth from the godhead. It became 
equally easy to build a series of religious sects upon 
_ different interpretations of the ideas in subsequent 
ages, until the monstrous tissue of fact and fable known 
as Hindooism, with its multifarious gods and shrines, 
took the place of the pure and primitive ideas taught 
by the great teachers of India in the days when the 
Vedas were given, and which even yet reflect much of 
its ancient glory. ^ 

For India really obtained a knowledge of the essen- 
tial principles that pertain to all departments of plan- 
etary life. She could not express them in the literal 
delineation of the Western nations, but she saw into 
the generic principles of form and spirit, and left a 
record of many truths that can only be rediscovered in 
the experiences of this age. She knew both Om and 
Brahm, and the relations that each held in universal 

the diifereut gradations of the same powers that pertain to plane- 
tary form in its first stages of unfoldment. This spirit entity be- 
longs to tlie planet as nuich as a natural child belongs to the fonns 
from which it received its incipient evolution, and as a spirit it 
must perfect its form powers in planetary conditions or not have a 
perfect development. This is why so many feeble spirits have to 
be earthbouud until they outgrow the weaknesses of earth life, or, 
in other words, obtain a well balanced form to express power. — B. 
/ * Mr. A. P. Sinnett, in his masterly treatise on Esoteric Bud- 
dhism, reflects the power of the combination of craft and truth 
wliich the priestly class of India are teaching as the doctrines of 
Gautama. While the book probably is the most elaborate and 
reliable on the subject given from the earthly transmission of the 
ancient doctrines, it bears the marks of the priesthood, and its 
concealed dogmas and hints stamp it as defective in this particu- 
ular at least. This age has no further use for priests or their 
interpretations of the origiual doctrines. — B. 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 115 

life. She touched the shores of immortal existence, and 
brought back to earth the essential ideas that ultimately 
make that sphere of being a realm of undying felicity. 
She lighted the torches of G-recian and Egyptian 
science, which raised the savages of the West to the 
sphere of an intellectual development in the realm of 
material forces unsurpassed in the history of the planet. 
She is the mother of the idea of the divine in the hu- 
man, and to her the nations of earth will yet accord the 
l^raise or recognition of being the first to formulate a 
system of spiritual gradation that has never been sur- 
passed, as well as to touch upon the lines of thought 
that bind planet to planet and system to system in the 
Universal Cosmos, and she was the first to give to earth 
the intelligible reasons for the existence of worlds in the 
economy of Creative purposes.* 

G-rand as has been her past, it equals not her future; 
for when a nation arises once to the heights of intellect- 
ual spirituality it can never fall so low as to entirely 
lose its position in the world of spiritual thought. Her 
seed, so abundantly cast upon the waters of earth, is 

* Those who have studied the metaphorical statements of Indian 
cosmology have been struck with the remarkable coincidences of 
the ideas veiled in that manner with the discoveries of modern 
science. AYhen they speak of the golden womb from which the 
Sun god issued, it is only a poetical method of teaching the great 
principle of planetary gestation ill the solar stage of planetary for- 
mation. Veiled in the darkness of creative powers, the great 
planets of the siderial system literally had a golden womb in 
which they came into cosmic existence, and the masterly intellects 
of ancient India pierced the veil that shrouds creative mysteries 
and gave them to the world in metaphor. See "Siderial Evolu- 
tion," opposite page 1. — B. 



116 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

returning to her, and her life again shall arise from the 
dust of the past, and she shall resume her position as the 
mistress of all science in all the departments of being. 



CHAPTER XIII. 

THE FRATERNIZATION OF THE ORIENTAL AND OCCI- 
DENTAL NATIONS. 

The influx of Oriental philosophy into the mental en- 
vironment of the Western nations has ever been fraught 
with considerable effect upon the mental equilibrium of 
all to whom it has come as a distinct power. 

From the time when Pythagoras sought the shrines 
of India to learn of the science of the soul, until the 
scholars and sages of the present generation that are 
following in his footsteps, India has ever held the key 
of all thought in her grasp, and if reluctant to open the 
treasuries of her storehouse, nevertheless has had the 
treasures within her possession, although despised and 
condemned by her ignorant despoilers. 

England might send her fleets and armies to subdue 
and plunder a peaceful people, but England could never 
wrest from the sacred caste of India the greatest of its 
possessions, viz. , the accumulated treasures of the world's 
intellectual achievements of prehistoric ages. It was 
only when India chose to bestow these priceless gifts 
that the world of modern civilization . ever dreamed of 
their existence, and India never gave them up until the 
world of spirit had opened the gates of eternal life to 
the vision of the people of the Western world. 

There was a good reason for this, for the people of 
the West were unfit to handle these treasures, nor are 

(117) 



118 THE TKUE THEOSOPHY. 

they yet sufficiently spiritualized to receive them but 
in a modified degree. 

India as a nation founded her mental concepts of all 
life upon the demonstrated powers of the spirit in each 
world of its expression, and she was not one iota behind 
the mental development attained by any nation that 
ever lived upon the planet. She sought the fountain 
of spiritual knowledge, and, as far as obtaining that 
knowledge was possible in her then state of mental evo- 
lution, she went far above the schools of modern civil- 
ization, for she did not disassociate the powers of nature 
as expressed in the visible world from the forces of that 
same nature after their transition to the life eternal. 
She dwelt in harmony with the gods of the worlds, and 
the gods bestowed upon her the wisdom that gods only 
can bestow, and for lack of which the people of the 
West are groping in darkness at the shrines of priestly 
fabrication, and from which they can never emerge 
until, like the sages of India, they welcome the light 
which radiates from the spheres of spirit. 

Her great minds may aver that the cause of planetary 
life is unknown and unknowable, but India knows the 
nature of the world builders as she knows the source 
from which the Ganges flows. To her mind Brahm is 
not beyond the po^^er of analysis, neither is Om power- 
less to make his presence felt to mortals. 

. But Indian philosophy as it comes to the West should 
come in its pristine purity, shorn of the fictitious drapery 
which long ages have enabled the symbolic expression to 
conceal the truth from the open vision. There is no 
need M secret societies for the spread of the great ideas 
which since the age of the Vedas have made India a 
distinct reservoir of spiritual wisdom. Those ideas are 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. HQ 

indeed the wisdom of the gods, but they need no priestly 
ministrants in this age of the world. * 

They come from the world of spirit as freely now as 
they ever came to the great teacher in the palmy days 
of Sakya Muni or when the Vedas themselves were 
given by the wise instructors who spoke the words of 
Brahm. While the pundits of the modern age, both in 
India and in the Western world, are striving to revive 
the higher truths of spirit, they should not forget that 
with the mortals of earth the spirit hosts who linger 
there, earth bound by ignorance, are to rise equally in 
spirit by the sublime doctrines which emancipate all 
souls from the dominion of Agni. f 

It is thus that India can be instrumental in teaching 
the nations as to the truth of a spiritual life that knows 
no limitations of beneficence and no bounds to its 
advancement. It is thus she is to be the connecting 
link between the civilization of the remote past and the 

*The absurd claims of some of the theosophical schools of 
America to the possession of secret knowledge that cannot be com- 
municated to the world is pointedly rebuked by this statement. 
To suppose that the spiritual nature of man could be subjected to 
the domination of a close corporation of religious teachers in this 
age, is to rank the intelligence of the believers with the credulity 
that has made heathen and Christian nations the victims of an 
unscrupulous priesthood. No wonder a most vigorous protest 
from the other world is sent to this against the subjugation of the 
mentality of the West to any such farcical claims to the possession 
of Divine knowledge or spiritual powers as held by the initiates of 
the Oriental dogmas. Spiritual powers and all their accompani- 
ments seem to be more widespread than the close communion 
disciples of the Blavatsky school are willing to allow, and^ome of 
them do not hesitate to indulge in wholesale falsehood as a part of 
their system when others obtain all the secrets free of charge. — B. 

fThe Hindoo god of fire or the lower spheres. — B. 



120 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

dawning age of a spiritual evolution that will carr}^ the 
inhabitants of earth far above the plane of selfish con- 
cern for the future, and free them forever from the 
domination of mental as well as spiritual tyranny. 

For the people of earth are bound in slavish chains 
of fear when they regard the world of soul life as a dark 
and doleful realm for any soul that ever crosses its 
borders. It is only dark to the undeveloped and un- 
formed soul who, misinformed by its trusted instructors, 
comes to its presence unripe, and who is held in that 
condition until the embryotic spiritual nature can 
spring forth in. a new birth that carries it far above the 
plane of earth and its surroundings. 

That birth in spirit might as well be passed upon 
earth as to wait until the soul has left the sphere of 
mortal life. It must be had in one state or the other 
ere the intellectual powers of the soul can have their 
full development. When it is once effected, the soul no 
longer feels the influx of spirit only, but it can see the 
kingdom of the gods and becomes as one of them, know- 
ing good and evil and their exact relations to each other. 

The Western world has embodied this thought in its 
religious systems, but, like the systems of India, the 
thought will not follow the channel of expression merely 
because the individual happens to seek it there. It 
belongs to the universal realm of life, and every soul 
that exists tends toward it, and will ultimately attain 
it even if it misses at first the path that the great 
teachers marked out as leading to it. The soul must 
often make its own pathway, and when it does this, it 
is not far from the borders that lie between the mortal 
and the immortal life. It is a child of Brahm. and 
Brahm is never beyond the reach of its voice when it 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 121 

obeys the word of Brahm as voiced in its own con- 
sciousness. 

I have spoken severely of the egotism that belongs to 
the different advocates of the various religious systems 
of earth, and I have done so because as long as that 
exists there is an impassible barrier between the fra- 
ternization of the different races. When nations or 
classes forget their original status in the world, and cul- 
tivate pride of birth, or exclusive relations toward the 
rest of mankind, they arouse the worst elements in 
themselves or others that can be excited toward pro- 
ducing disastrous results in the department of their 
spiritual welfare. In place of attracting to themselves 
the finer qualities of spiritual regard in all who feel their 
influence, they excite a chilling antagonism that freezes 
the life blood of the spirit, and effectually bars out all 
desire for aid or intercourse. 

When a religious system is adopted by a sect or indi- 
vidual, based upon this theory, the rest of the world 
becomes indifferent to its existence, and naturally con- 
temptuous of its believers. It is valueless for the mind 
and dies a deserved death, for it only generates hatred 
as long as it serves to excite any interest in others. 
Many of the old religions of earth perished because of 
this, and most of them that are left would do well to 
heed the lessons of the past if they would survive the 
righteous judgment that befalls all the systems of earth. 
Those only live long that fill a human necessity, and 
when the need is outgrown, the system naturally fades 
out from human consideration. 

The nations of the West are imbued with the idea 
that Christianity is the only true system that ever ex- 
isted upon earth; the followers of Mohammed are sure 



122 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

that none but believers in the great prophet can ever 
cross the bridge which leads to paradise; the dis- 
ciples of Confucius are certain of a blessed reception 
awaiting the inhabitants of the flowery kingdom: but 
the sages of India know that the children of Brahm in 
all nations will receive the reward of faithful devotion 
to their highest knowledge when they pass to the life 
eternal, whether they bow the knee to Jesus, Allah, 
Joss or Brahm while in the earthly realm of being. 

It is to bring about a realization of this great truth, 
discovered so many centuries ago. that the present 
world wide spiritual movement is instituted. Many 
concerned in it imagine they have a better right to in- 
terpret it than others who, feeling its power, are 
moved to voice the sentiments underlying it, but the 
truth is, that to no sect or nation is the work confined. 

The Christian nations are being spiritualized by its 
power as never known before, although their priest- 
hoods oppose its methods if outside the channels they 
have constructed for it to flow in. The fierce son of the 
desert, who swears by Allah, is moved upon to be less 
cruel, and to consider if, after all, the rest of the world 
are not children of Allah, even if they know not of 
Mohammed as his prophet. The inhabitant of the 
celestial kingdom has never lost his reverence for the 
doctrines of the great teacher, and is more easily taught 
the great lesson of the universal fraternity of all races; 
while the pundit of India looks on in silence, wondering 
if the Vedantic prophecies are to be fulfilled in his day, 
and the nations of the earth are to become subservient 
to Brahm through spiritual light and knowledge. 

Thus the work of illuminating the earth is going- 
forward, and the light which once shone so brilliantly 



THE TEUE THEOSOPHY. 123 

on the plains of India is again sending its beams to 
the utmost'borders of the earth. It lights and warms 
the frigid creeds of barbaric Christian Europe, and 
fairly blazes and burns on the shores of distant Amer- 
ica. It finds a ready welcome there, for it fills the 
souls of that mighty people with the knowledge of 
spiritual life which the barren creeds of Europe never 
knew or realized. It radiates the brilliancy of an in- 
tellectual enlightenment of spirit that rivals the age of 
Gautama, and gives to the West the dawn of the 
Buddhahood which never before was known to shine 
beyond the shores of India. 

G-reat as has been the glory of Indian mentality, 
greater shall be the intellectual power of the West, 
for to her has come the light of the world which 
lighteth every man that comes into it. Grand as have 
been the achievements of America in the field of civil 
and religious emancipation, they shall be surpassed in 
the greater conquest of the animal by the spiritual 
and the evolution of a mentality that exceeds any at- 
tainment ever made by the Oriental world. 

For the Western world is the home of the spiritual 
philosophy, new born and newly christened, in this age 
of the planet. It is the planetary center where all the 
nations fraternize, and where, casting aside the narrow 
creeds and dogmas of the old world, the people rise to 
some comprehension of the life in spirit, where all the 
nations of the earth meet in peace and harmony. It 
is the only nation that reflects the true principles that 
o-overn the life eternal, and India, with her numerous 
races, when freed from the domination of foreign rulers, 
will find the great nation of the West her chosen ally 
and friend. Each represents the highest culmination 



124 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

of eai'thly attainment, and both are to stand before the 
world the great republics of the two hemispheres. 
Each had its discipline under England's power, but 
as America threw off the yoke when the time of her 
birth as a republic had come, so India in time will 
emerge from the thralldom of a foreign power, to become 
the model republic of the Oriental world. 

She is not dead, nor is she to sleep in for get fulness 
of her birthright forever. She is the oldest of all na- 
tions that have held their autonomy, and she belongs 
to the great fraternity of man in spirit, for she was the 
first to teach the race. the principles of spiritual frater- 
nization. 

America is her child in spirit, and America will be 
the only child she will ever recognize as having the title 
to an immortal nationality. To her come the greatest 
of her spiritual teachers, and while the lesser lights of 
India emit their feeble rays upon the mortal j^lane, the 
greater souls who once taught the truth in its purity are 
able to speak directly, and correct the errors with which 
human ignorance or craft has obscured the doctrines. 

The children of the West and the offspring of the 
East are alike precious to the souls of the great masters 
of India, and because of the estimation in which both are 
held, do the sages of former ages send their thoughts 
back again, to tell the people of all nations that India 
greets all souls as Om cares for all worlds, and that no 
soul can ever perish who comes into being in Brahm's 
world or in Om's universe. 



SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF BRAHMA. 



In the ancient traditions of India, we are frequently 
met with allusions to a certain teacher to whom was 
applied the term of the great Brahma. This appella- 
tion has often caused much speculation as to who was 
meant, for its connection with the Hindoo deity, who 
represents creative power, caused many to infer that 
the great Brahma could only mean the creator of the 
worlds, or the ruler of the universe. 

But a better acquaintance with the metaphorical lan- 
guage of that country reveals the fact, that in the most 
ancient traditions any great character who strikingly 
manifested the traits of a spiritual unfoldment was 
termed a son of Brahm, and that there are several upon 
whom the application of the term Brahma was bestowed. 

The Vedas are said to have issued from the four 
mouths of Brahma, which is a symbolical method of desig- 
natino; four different authors of the sacred books. Thus 
the mythology of ancient India grew apace, from the 
various traditions of the schools of philosophy and re- 
ligion that clustered around the numerous incarnations 
of Brahm, to whom the term Brahma was indiscrimi- 
nately applied, and Brahminism naturally embodied 
most of the ideas in modified form in its religious sys- 
tem. 

The teacher to whom India was most indebted for her 
spiritual enlightenment, probably soon after the inva- 
sion of the Aryan race, is better known as the great 

(125) 



126 THE TKUE THEOhOPHY. 

Brahma, from the impress he made upon the nation 
through his probable compilation of the Vedas. His 
true history is lost or obscured by traditions, but frag- 
ments of his doctrines are still preserved in some of the 
most striking ideas of the Vedantic philosophy. 

This teacher evidently was cosmopolitan in his treat- 
ment of the different races in India, and the fine quota- 
tion, that the Supreme Brahm is said to have uttered, 
which is often given as the highest expression of Deific 
benevolence, belongs to him, viz.: "Those who serve 
other gods in sincerity, worship me."' 

That unique work, Ouhspe^ has quite a full account 
of this teacher, and although much of it is symbolical 
in idea rather than literal in interpretation, it probably 
gives quite as good an idea of the life work of this 
teacher as any tradition extant. With his wife, he is 
represented as living a life of self-denial and hardship, 
that he might instruct the people in the ancient Zara- 
thustrian faith, of belief in and obedience to Ormazd 
as the only true god worthy of worship. 

This teacher belonged to tlie Semitic race, and was of 
obscure orisrin, and his true name seems to have been 
lost in the lapse of ages, or rather obscured by the 
title that overshadowed his personal characteristics. 

In treating of ancient Hindoo historic characters, 
especially of the religious order, one has to be extremely 
careful in his estimates of the probable and fanciful, 
for the people of India have cultivated the imaginative 
faculties so excessively, that truth and fiction are blended 
so perfectly as to seem inseparable. In doing this, 
they seem unconsciously to have no power of discrimi- 
nation between the false and the real, and live in a 
mental glamour that is unknown in European conscious- 



THE TRUE THE080PHY. 127 

ness. Hence, they have the reputation of being incor- 
rigable liars, when in reality they are unable to discern 
between what they mentally perceive as truth and what 
externally exists as reality. 

The great teachers of India all strove to correct this 
defect, and especially did the teacher called the great 
Brahma endeavor to impress upon the people the real re- 
lations that exist in the spheres of conscious life and all 
their consequences to the spiritual nature. European 
scholarship is bringing to light the treasures of Asiatic 
literature, and the proper translation of the ideas 
embodied in it will do much toward qualifying the claims 
of the Western nations to the possession of exclusive 
religious revelation from the spiritual world. The great 
Brahma left in the Vedas about as distinct a record of 
the primitive religious ideality of India as now exists, 
and it is fully as worthy of confidence as the revelations 
upon which the Christian world basis its creedal sys- 
tems. There is in the Upanishads and other ancient 
writings the impress of as distinct a system of Mono- 
theistic worship, as well as a comprehensive description 
of the attributes of the Su]3reme Deity, as can be found 
in any sacred writing in the world. 

Those who think that India has not anything of value 
to give to the world in this age should read Max Muller 
and Edwin Arnold carefully, and compare the ideality 
embodied in some of the sacred writings that belong to 
India with the system of thought that pertains to the 
Christian world. From the frequent allusions to the 
Devas and their influence upon the world of mortals, 
and the system of grading the gods and spirits into 
guardians and protectors of earth, we can see how the 
ancient Hindoo faith antedates Christian mythology, 



128 THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 

and corresponds in all essential points to the highest 
concepts of modern ideality in its definitions of the 
spiritual life. 

That the great Brahma must have been familiar with 
spiritual knowledge of a high order, is evident from the 
spirit of the Vedantic writings, which embody the purest 
philosophy of the ancient world. It is not strange that 
the Brahmin priesthood sought to preserve a monopoly 
of the ideas embodied in the Vedas, and forbade the 
transmission of them except by oral recitation from 
century to century, although it is not improbable that 
ere the rise of this priesthood they might have been 
preserved in writing. 

In dealing with the perverted ideas of modern Brah- 
minism, one has to be continually upon guard against 
the misconstruction of the ancient ideality, for the 
subtle distinction that prevails in the Hindoo mind of 
this age is hardly perceptible in the mentality that be- 
longs to the early teachers who never stooped to decep- 
tion or tolerated the spirit of craft. The great teachers 
of ancient India were famous for their simplicity of doc- 
trines, and never can be accused of willfully mystifying 
the truths they sought to bestow upon their followers. 

That the true history of the great Brahma must have 
been purposely obscured by the craft of the priesthood 
of subsequent ages is almost unquestionable, although 
in so doing the priesthood could the better conceal their 
deviation from the pure philosophy which he taught, 
and by which India rose to some realization of the sub- 
lime heights of spirituality that belonged to the system 
of Zarathustra. 

The Vedantic prophecies, read in the light of spirit- 
ual revelations in this age, show conclusively that mod- 



THE TRUE THEOSOPHY. 129 

ern scholarship is at fault rather than Indian philosophy, 
and that the spiritual ideas embodied in it have a sub- 
stantial foundation. They also show that the great 
teachers of India have always been true to their knowl- 
edge of spirituality, nor did they ever sink in the scale 
of inability to learn the greater truths of the life im- 
mortal and its connection with the consciousness of 
earth. 

While many of our European and American thinkers 
have been active in propagating ignorance of a spirit- 
ual world as an antidote to the perverted spiritual com- 
prehension prevalent in Christian countries, the sages 
of India have never been swerved from their allegiance 
to the transmitted faith of the Vedas, and confidence in 
the immortality of the spirit is still a cardinal principle 
of Brahminism. 

It is hardly questionable if this idea is not the 
strongest motive power of the present age, and if it 
will not be the point of contact where the thought of 
the liberal and spiritual mind of the West will reach 
the religious elements of India and quicken them into 
a new life. Certain it is that anything less than this 
will not be received in India by the disciples of the 
great Brahma, and if this fails the Brahmin caste will 
ultimately be superseded by some more liberal ex- 
ponents of the ideas that once made India the teacher of 
spiritual ideality among the nations of the earth. 
10 



THE COMING OF BRAHMA. 



Where Jumna greets the Gauges' flood, 
The aucient sage of ludia came, 

Aud altars staiued with humau blood, 
Forever vanished through his name. 

When Brahma comes, the Yedas say, 
The race of man shall have new birth; 

The gloom of night be changed to day. 
The gods be seen upon the earth. 

O, Sons of Light, that hour draws nigh! 

The radiant gleams of Heavenly truth 
Are shining from the world on high, 

As in the hour of Brahma's youth. 

Through North and South, in East or West, 
The light of Spirit fills the Earth; 

No more in symbols now expressed, 
Thus Brahma has his second birth. 

The Buddha shines with star-like grace, 
' ' It lights the hosts of Brahma' s heaven, ' 

But Brahma lights the earthly race 
With power of mind to mortals given. 

O, Sons of Brahm, this world is ours! 

No longer seek the gods of yore; 
Within the soul are all the powers 

That rule the worlds forevemiore. 



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